The second step (deconvolution) helps further reduce blurring, but subsequent processing appears to be cosmetic. For example, the brightness of the solar disk appears to have been inverted here; brightness should decrease with distance from center disk, and the dark splotches should appear bright.

Many of the individual frames will be heavily blurred/distorted due to turbulence in the Earth's atmosphere, so the idea of the first step ("lucky imaging") is to average over the frames that appear the least blurred. This produces a more accurate and better looking image.

They existed. This image is from 2012 at the latest

From Sander Vancanneyt: "For an unknown reason SWPC stated delivering old data. We assume that SWPC always gives recent data, so we didn’t check the timestamps as it normally wouldn’t be necessary… until today 😭" community.spaceweatherlive.com/topic/3962-b...