I think some of them are actually run by Reddit directly. They couldn't find any way to keep making 'line go up', so they decided they could sumulate growth by machine translating Indian users to English and vice versa.
I think they're translating between users transparently to make it look like it's not a ghost town, and the machine translation reads like bot text.
I could be wrong, it's just a guess.
You're probably right, as Reddit has or wants to go to the stock market and they need to demonstrate line going up, even if it's fake.
Because even fake / generated content gets impressions, comments, upvotes, etc, which is the kind of metrics they optimize for.
Reddit has been botting since the very beginning and never stopped.
This is true. I vouched it. It's well known that Reddit was initially seeded by bots copying from other sites to fake organic activity.