I've been pretty hardcore against bots for a very long time. Got into a lot of fights over it on discord.
I do realize they are needed to provide game liquidity, but I would prefer that the devs would provide the bots for that, bots that wouldn't be taking away from the reward pool.

But they don't. So now me and some others are running botted starter deck accounts to provide liquidity in novice and bronze 3 and 2. We don't keep the rewards ourselves. They are collected in special savings accounts and are used to help newbies.
Last month, all rewards from those bots were sent to the NewBoost initiative, so they could be handed out to new players.
Unfortunately, it's not sure untiqm will continue the Newboost initiative, so we'll have to find another way to distribute the rewards of those bots to new players.

For my personal accounts, I must admit I turned over to the dark side myself a couple of months ago.
I now have 3 accounts botted. 2 are only temporary. After 3 months of very bad experiences with 5 different delegatees while I wasn't feeling well, I simply had enough of it, so I decided to bot them until

1. I could find players that would at least put in an effort
2. I would be feeling well enough to put in the time to follow up and distribute rewards at the end of the season.

I'll probably start looking for players again after the next season.

1 is permanent, since it's a level 1 account, and these days, players looking for delegated decks are aiming higher. Back in the days, players were thankful if they could play a delegated level 1 account, but those days are over. Now they all want at least a bronze or silver level account. 😂

The account had been gathering dust for over a year, so at one point, a couple of months ago, I said f*** it and started botting it. It's not like I can use my alpha level 1 cards for anything else - there aren't even any alpha novice tournaments (never have been, afaik.)

I still feel bad about doing it myself, and I hope I'll be able to delegate out those 2 decks to real, serious players again soon.

I gave up on the fight against bots, it's a losing battle. It's too easy and too cheap to bot your account, and the rewards are better if you do it than if you would find a delegated player, because then you have to split the rewards and you get only half or so.
So I can't blame people for choosing to get the best ROI.

imo, the big bot nets are the real problem. There's still a difference between people using a bot and reinvest the rewards into the game to build their deck, and people running 50 or more bots, only to sell off the rewards and take them out instead of reinvesting into the game - these last ones are bad for the ecosystem.

But hey, there's nothing to do against it if it's allowed. And since the devs want this game to be as decentralized as possible, they can't ban bots, because they'll be taking away the freedom of being able to do what you want with your cards.

I agree they have taken some measurements to keep bots from draining the entire reward pool, but I still doubt the patches are/will be sufficient.