This is the piece of text that suddenly fractured me today.

I can't speak for the whole world, but there was a very specific period in Russian history when certain categories of people started to be known and often referred to as bots. This was many years ago, has gone through several evolutions, and continues to this day with no signs of stopping (afaik).

This foreshadowed the emergence of LLMs savvy enough to start replacing those people in online discourses, but it hardly changed the connotation of the term.

It was certainly a long, continuous process, but I feel that given enough data, I would have been able to pinpoint some milestones and points of no return, ballparking it to mid-2000s globally and December 2011 for RU politics specifically.

It just registered for me, today, now, while looking at that damn comment.
No conclusions on this yet, I'm just feeling weird.