They don't necessarily need to "break it" but to evolve it a bit into a service. I'm sure you have people who would be happy to pay for bots, larger groups and business features (including myself). In some countries, WhatsApp is larger than a chat app, it's a social network but without any features, there's a gap somewhere here.
That gap is the feature, and I'm willing to pay to keep it that way. The moment bots start spamming my WA feeds/groups I'll be gone. I'll move to Signal and if my contacts don't do the same, I'll just switch back to SMS with spam filters.
When I meant "bots" I meant only manually. I can't subscribe manually to a bot right now and I can't add a bot to a group I own.
I agree with you: if the subscription has to be by the user, the subscribed entity is managed like other contacts and I never get unsubscribed messsges/requests I would surely like to subscribe to the info that actually matters to me directly (conceptually opposite to “following feeds” on twitter). Completely personalized information and without installing one more app for every subscribed entity.
Exactly same situation here wrt ads. I'm willing to pay for E2E encryption with my money. I'm not willing to pay with my time/attention/battery life/everything else ads entail.
Bots will likely mean that the end to end encryption will be gone, so WhatsApp as we know it will be broken.
Nope, it just needs a more complicated way of handling the API where you run a Docker container with the client that does the E2E encryption, and you interact with that.