I really hate the phrase “bots” because it gives the appearance that they’re all useless and malicious. I guarantee you they lumped in the following extremely valid uses of “bots”:
Automated personal scripts that many programmers use, these are technically bots. Hell, I use a “bot” to auto-clip digital Safeway coupons
Moderation bots on sites like Lemmy/Reddit
Archive efforts
Are AI chatbots bots? If they use a loose enough definition all this means is humans utilize fuck tons of automation over the Internet, both programmers and not.