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RE: The Facts
No. They took their customers money and exercised ownership control of it, and still do. The money is still in their possession today, and not in the possession of the rightful owners thereof.
They stole, and kept it. They committed a crime, and worse, had agreed to protect that money from thieves, committing yet another crime. Theft, fraud, and extortion. You might find that acceptable, but I don't.
I don't find it morally acceptable, but I still refuse to call it "theft", and I don't even think it's against the law (though, of course, different laws may apply in different jurisdiction. I expect the successful exchanges to end up in jurisdictions that are "friendly" to the exchanges).
When depositing tokens into an exchange, all you get back is an "IOU". For most exchanges, the tokens won't be held in any special wallet dedicated you as a customer, the tokens ends up in some common wallet owned by the exchange. There may be an expectation that the exchanges don't do "fractional banking" and always keep sufficient funds to deal with the withdrawals should absolutely all the customers simultaneously decide to withdraw - but I don't think the exchanges are legally obliged to keep all the tokens available (again, different jurisdictions, different laws). The consequence of not being able to process withdrawals may be bankruptcy.
A company A may deposit money to the bank, and the same money may be lent out to competitor B. An organization advocating for legalization of drugs may deposit money to the bank, and the same money may be lent out to an organization advocating for a harder "war on drugs". Etc. Most people would deem it acceptable.
Overbookings are also normal. Airline companies expects some cancellations and may throw out passengers from the plane if needed. It's comparable, one may argue that the customer "owns" a seat on that particular flight. It's totally unacceptable to get plans and connections ruined as one is thrown out from the plane, but it's still not "theft", it's not illegal, and in general overbookings are deemed acceptable as the alternative would be to fly with empty seats.
Internet providers do a lot of overbooking - hundreds of customers may promised 50 Mbps of downstream capacity, but they are sharing a 5 Gbps line. One may argue that I've paid for 50 Mbps of capacity and hence the ISP should have 50 Mbps of capacity reserved and ready for me, but ... it's not theft if my bandwidth temporarily falls down to 5 Mbps due to upstream capacity issues.
One notable exception - in the linux kernel, the nomenclature is indeed "CPU theft" when one virtual machine does not get the CPU share it's being promised due to overbooking.
On a related note, it's absolutely not "theft" to watch a movie that one haven't paid for, and "piracy" is robbery on the sea and nothing except for that. I'd also argue that "hacking" is to find novel though not necessarily elegant ways to solve problems, often involving using things in completely different ways than what they were intended for, but that's probably a lost battle. It's a general problem that people are twisting language to suit their agendas. That's a misappropriation ... though I wouldn't go as far as calling it "theft of words" :-)
Well, if I take your money from you, you're going to bitch. If anyone takes your money from you you're going to bitch. That's because it's your money and they took it from you.
It's also why I don't use banks or exchanges. Because they're thieves.
When theft is legal, government is a crime.
The real problem is not your keys, not your crypto. I have learned that lesson the hard way. Now Binance customers have too. Bet Binance loses customers.
Perhaps a majority of binance customers doesn't know or care what's going on. They will bitch if and only if they try to withdraw Steem and can't because Binance is lacking the liquidity to do so. Just like ordinary people won't bitch that the bank is lending their savings to other parties (but will bitch if the bank is unable to fullfil it's obligations), airline passenges won't bitch if the flight is overcommited (but will bitch if it's actually overbooked and they are the unlucky ones that won't be allowed on the flight), etc.