You're talking about one of the oldest lemmy instances, the most active established instance, and the instance with highest per capita activity, at a time when activity has suddenly become higher than ever because suddenly there are a bunch of redditors saying awful shit all over our feeds and we can go dunk on them without needing to bother with accounts on different sites for the first time in over three years.

You're also vastly overestimating what bots require and do: all we have to do is look at the largest and most sophisticated botnets - the CIA/State Department astroturfing botnets - to see how even the laziest and crudest copy/pasta spam is all it takes to completely dominate and drown out opposition. Literally no one needs to be sneaky, just yell the exact same verbatim press release quote over and over from ten thousand firstnamelastname12345 accounts with stock photo profile pics and you control the conversation completely and no one cares if you get caught out, like the CIA/State Department bots constantly do.

You're also claiming that the instance was built up with chatbots more sophisticated than anything there is today - and all of those still-not-coherent most-sophisticated AIs are extremely expensive to run - starting at a time when the most advanced language generating AI was GPT-2, which was only a step or so above old markov chain babbling. You can literally go and look at the ancient post history yourself.