Chatbots, when done right, properly field answer your questions across a limited scope and domain, and allow for an easy exit to talk to a human. As a customer support platform with bots, my company helps businesses reduce their customer support load effectively using chatbots while making sure customers are able to talk to a person if they need to.

As a business, when you have customers asking the same question over and over (shipping questions, where is my order etc), it makes sense for a bot to handle that, and have your staff handle other more specific issues such as refunds, payment issues, or any other questions that the bot wasn't able to handle, or if the customer specifically hits the 'I want to talk to someone' button

My guess is the "bots" you've dealt with are dead-end bots that don't offer a way to speak to an actual person and are meant to make it as difficult as possible for you to actually reach someone. That's unfortunate - maybe it's a business decision (a poor one), or the chatbot just doesn't work very well and doesn't have a way to escalate.

Chatbots have gotten so much flak because a bunch of them try to use as much AI as possible to answer every possible question and businesses think chatbots makes needing an actual human support team unnecessary, which unfortunately is not the case.