exactly this, they’ll traverse the entire map to revive a bot the moment it goes down, but will fight right on top of your downed body and watch you bleed out. I’ve stopped playing this week as well because of my frustration with this game and lack of actual players.
My guess would be a bug. It’s not like it would be the first time.
I don’t see the incentive for them to make the bots bad on purpose. It’s just one more thing pissing off a chronically-pissed-off player base. How does that benefit them? I suspect shitty bot AI is one of the main issues holding them back from releasing a solo mode, which is a feature they’ve been taking flak for not implementing yet. Local hosting should be possible for solo mode, so server costs shouldn’t be a significant limitation. Bad solo gameplay with bad bot AI is the most obvious reason they’d be hesitant to release solo mode, since most players are not capable of clutching and playing with 3 braindead bots is a borderline clutch scenario against any real enemy pressure.
Why don’t they prioritize improving bots? Probably because they’re under constant pressure to release new content, fix various bugs, add QoL improvements that have been relegated to unofficial mods (which console players can’t use) for most of the game’s life, improve game balance, improve performance, so on and so forth. They need to devote their resources to what they think will have the most impact, and since bots are usually a temporary annoyance in the standard game modes, I assume bots are a low priority compared to these other goals.