It's not piracy doing this though. Technically you might still be in breach of some intellectual property but since it's usually discontinued services a lot of games publishers turn a blind eye.
I grew up in the private server scene for a popular MMO and you're absolutely right. It was a whole lot of teenagers with energy drinks grinding through reverse-engineering minutia that adults would gawk at and make excuses to avoid doing.
That said there was a lot of automation, scripts, and other tooling, to make it easier. The best were able to i.e. update a private server automatically when the base game updated. We were doing automation at a higher level then F500 companies were at the time (mid 2000s) and we were just kids.
Right. I don't think the question is if you need AI (obviously you don't), but if AI could do all the annoying, tedious bits for us, and speed up the process.
To be clear, people do this stuff as a passion project so nothing stopping someone from investing the time in training a ML model to assist here if that’s something that sounds like fun to them. they wanted to take on. So from a technical standpoint one “could” use AI. But I’d expect you’d first have to train the AI to play game before you can even think about training it to read the network packets. And the former is a far more daunting problem than the latter.
Sometimes problems are better solved with human intelligence, a lot of automation, and patience.