That statement really makes no difference since no caches were 'grandfathered'. If a cache was published 3 minutes before the announcement at 4:00pm PDT last Friday, at 1 minutes after 4, it still would not be allowed to have an ALR.
It sounds like there was some other issues with the caches if they were indeed really just Puzzles and not ALRs.
Nope, it was the ALR. One of the caches actually published too early and was taken off. Obviously that cache was ok but even that one has not be published again.