Not very useful.
A more cogent question would be "For anyone in Facebook working on this problem, do you feel like sufficient organizational resources are being spent combating it? Is there low hanging fruit, or are we into the whack-a-mole stage of any popular platform with a financial incentive to cheat?"
From my very limited experience there are two main categories of websites:
1. Using curl and/or [library of your choice] in a [scripting language of choice] is enough
2. Forget about not being detected without a full blown browser unless you want to spend endless hours trying to emulate whatever is needed to be emulated and also willing to burn some accounts and IPs in the process.
Answering last question, it depends what do you mean by scripting language. Let's assume it is Python then you have two choices: imitate browser or risk to be detected as bot quite fast. Writing browser extension is quite easy and you can imitate real user quite easy. The only problem that you will have is to imitate real human being in a way that does not match Instagram's bot detection algorithm.
[0] dedicated in a sense of lets include some script specifically designed to detect Selenium. [1] for example it's kind of unlikely that non-bot visitor is using IP from a range used by amazon instances. not sure how often this is used but I assume that most bot-detection systems would use that information at least as one of the metrics
I think what we're seeing instead is the same as counterfeits or promoted search results at Amazon: solving it could become an existential threat to either popularity or profit, so they're just "managing" it as BAU.
In either case, Facebook has a financial incentive to say nothing, instead of publicizing lackluster results.
Or, my guess, they'd rather keep any news about the existence of this off the front pages, as broader knowledge of its existence by their (not as technically informed) advertising customers only negatively impacts Facebook.
Kind of how a beachfront town wouldn't want to advertise the fact that Great White sharks exist... at all.
Then if they also happen to anyhow benefit from the existence of those fake accounts then it becomes even harder to justify costly filters and leads to a sufficient-enough-to-not-look-obviously-weak grade filtering
The problem here is that adversaries are adjusting to whatever measures are put in place. In that respect it might be more like winning at Chess or Go. Which computers can do, but it’s decidedly non-trivial.
And here’s the kicker: If we postulate some hand-wavium big-data/machine-learning/AI that can detect bots and adjust when the bots evolve, why can’t we also postulate some hand-wavium big-data/machine-learning/AI that can run bots and evade the bot detection?
Facebook is entirely out of control as a social force, and PR agencies are the only thing holding back public perception.
There's probably not much incentivation to investigate them too deeply.