I think that's excessively cynical take. "People" might care about network effects more than a lot of other things technology people thing they should care about, but I don't think that will extend to socializing with networks of bots.
A lot of tech people tend to focus too much on surface appearances and neglect social context. A connection with a bot is not equivalent to a connection with a real person, even when a tech person can't distinguish the posts.
I suspect newer platforms and small enclaves that want to be larger will be tempted to use AI. Reddit's founders infamously created fake accounts and put fake posts on their platform when it started to make it look active.[0] That was actually a pretty common technique to address the "chicken and egg" dilemma that every new forum has: Nobody wants to join a forum that has no posts and no active users but the forum won't get posts or active users unless somebody joins. AI can solve this problem much more efficiently than if the founders are writing the fake posts.
[0]: https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2012/06/reddi...
Of course they are controlled by a real human. The question is if that human is posting or an AI controlled by the human?
I am an optimist