"Kimi is largely a byproduct of distillation" and "Kimi is introducing new and novel approaches" are not mutually exclusive, and I'm not sure it's clear from the paper how much of the improvement comes from the new approaches. So I wouldn't take the new approaches to be much evidence about whether the distillation attacks occurred.
I thought there is discussion circulating around whether the main reason Kimi is impressive is due to distillation. Though possibly if this occurred, this was just one component of their training pipeline and not a majority
