As i argued in another comment, there are many useful bots for certain niche communities that I really think have a place here, even though I am generally wary of AI accounts infesting the fediverse as well.
Good examples for good and very useful, yet not mod work related bots are on TCG/CCG subs like magic the gathering and hearthstone to provide context to card names, or convert deck codes into a nicely formatted table of the used cards. Or on the Lego sub, returning any set number as a link to the proper bricklink entry. This kind of bot should be allowed and even encouraged to be used where appropriate.
Then there are the plenty of irrelevant and annoying bots we really can do without, like the alphabetical order bot, haiku bot, the dozens of bots quoting LOTR or Star Wars characters, and so on. Like most reddit jokes they stopped being funny fairly quickly and now add nothing to the conversation, but are being kept around for karma.
And then there are the more insidious bots that are about to become widespread, being harder to detect the more their refinement advances. It is going to be a constant arms race between bot detection and bot deception skills.
While I agree that certain state sponsored actors and private interest groups are most definitely involved in discourse manipulation on reddit, Lemmy simply isn’t big enough for this yet.
If we go by the numbers stated in the original post, the whole of Lemmy has less than 500k users at this point, whom are overwhelmingly <40 years old tech affine early adopter nerds from the United States and Western Europe.
Too insignificant to spend resources on, and also largely sceptical of corporate interests and authoritarian governments (except the tankies of course); so by default critical of the two top potential manipulators.