A chatbot is like an inefficient front end on an FAQ, you have to guess what they might be able to do, and guess what might trigger them to understand you. Best case scenario, you get the chatbot to provide you with a "help" response that's basically the FAQ.
A simple list of options will always beat a "conversational interface" to a list of potential back-end actions.
Incidentally, I think this gets obscured a but when dealing with businesses whose goal is to confuse or frustrate you into not taking action. If you look at Amazon or Uber's FAQ, they are designed to take you in circles and prevent you from getting any recourse or talking to a person. Chatbots could be helpful for this application
One logical reason for obscuring the real interface is to make the interface appear more robust than it actually is, so pure marketing, but outside of that I'm not sure what the value is.
similar to home assistants Siri/Alexa/Google where 99% of the creative things you try don't work so you end up with just using it to set timers and play music
But I'll note that I have extremely effective-at-reading-and-synthesizing friends who enjoy watching/listening to YouTube, so it may not be a complete explanation for the nefarious spread of horribly inefficient videos that should've been text.
I think it's ok as a first step to route customer care cases, like "payments issue","delete account" etc, but nothing more granular than that.
That and link rot, when procedures have been updated, but the faq haven't. Infuriating.
For people who can't be arsed to glance through a FAQ, they're kind of an iterative natural-language query interface.