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.
Because they're used absolutely everywhere, and often back large portions of Internet infrastructure. I'm a backend developer and we have thousands of "bots" running at any given time to keep our systems going. They generate traffic equivalent to thousands of people and are maintained by a 3 person dev team. This is for a relatively small company. When I was at AWS the scale was much more unfathomable.
Not really, as with many others the headline is sensationalist. It's missing the "... on login page attempts for sites that pay for and or use bot protection services."