Lost Ark averaged 200 thousand concurrent players last March and April. How many of those are bots? Players later discovered that over half of them are bots.

And given how FF14's STF is the epitome of ineptness, and given how the bot problem is getting worse and worse when people do less and less content, can we really say that the game has "grown"?

I daresay that most of the player "growth" is actually driven by bots. A good guess would be that 30-40% of the 1 million "active" players are indeed bots and alts.