Which leads us to the question of can we even stop them if we wanted to.

Of course not. We can only mitigate the problem (if we dub it as such) to an extent by making it a bit more difficult for them to function. But there are bot account on every single social network out there and having them in the open has a certain benefits to it.

Still Steemit has the same problem as some social network, I've seen a lot of accounts that try to pose like generic people while their comments are obviously automatic. This is the type of bots are the biggest problem of it all.

I personally dislike voting bots too, because they devalue the curation efforts of the people voting manually. The idea here (as far as I understand it) is to have the best or the most valuable content receive the most votes and get the largest share of the rewards. But automatic voting in all of it's form doesn't and can't take into account the value of the post it's voting for and this is detrimental to the quality of the content that is most visible on the platform. It can justifiably be viewed as just gaming the system for the curation rewards.

I would be very happy to hear your thoughts on the matter and if and where I'm wrong in my reasoning as do not claim to have a good grasp of the big picture and I'm kind of guessing. Does my guesswork make any sense to you?