To each their own, but I found plenty of useful or entertaining bots on Reddit. If you hate bots that much, there is a toggle in your Lemmy settings to block all labelled bot accounts.

I don’t see a problem with having the feature as an option. It only becomes a problem if it is misused by moderators.

I agree that welcome messages are often just clutter, but I don’t think that this means the feature should not be included. For some communities, a welcome message is appropriate. Moderators don’t need to use every feature for a given community.