[quandrum]

One thing I worry about is how normalized this will be for children and countries without regular internet access as they get regular internet access (or even have had it for a while: the report from OP states that 71 percent of traffic on Irish sites are bots).

The experience of the internet will be bots and because the usefulness of the medium isn't going away, they will keep using it. Everything being bots will be normal.

At some point things like ubiquitous ads, smog, light pollution or dozens of corporate microphones in our house was something humans first started experiencing and having trepidations about. Then it got normalized. Sometimes we fixed it like smog or CFCs and sometimes it became one the largest sectors of our economy (ads). Statistically, it seems more likely that dead internet is here to stay