There is a difference in the way people and bots might "view" value. A bot is an automated algorithm that requires very little resources to run while a person that is active on the platform manually tends to value their own time more. On top of this, you can't scale your own time as it's a limited resource, but you can scale bots pretty much indefinitely as you could just run more and more instances (I'm mainly talking about spambots). This means that even if an automated account makes pennies a day while creating a huge amount of spam, it might still offer a positive ROI to the person running it while a real person might be unhappy with such a low return for their time spent on the platform. This difference creates different incentives for people and bots, so a desirable balance might be harder to achieve and it seems quite unlikely to me that the free market could eradicate this type of automation. But I wholeheartedly agree that this is by no means the end of the world, it's just a simple fact of life here on steemit.