It doesn't feel like that to me. Elon reported that Twitter hit a new all time high of "user seconds" last week. Reddit usage doesn't seem to have gone down much. In my opinion, what you are really experiencing is wishful thinking.
You can believe what you want. I choose to believe what I see with my eyes.
However, you mentioned that today is an admission that the bot problem is worse. However that not true, the restrictions are specifically on viewing data (scrapers) rather than creating data (bots).
I’m not inclined to take Elon’s words at face value, he has an incentive to pump any statistic that makes it seem Twitter is growing.
A famously trustworthy source.
In theory the goal would be to push people like me to register and get an account to at least view, and force me into their platform/ecosystem so I can be measure and monetized.
Unfortunately, much like ape pics, printscreen key exists and people will simply pivot to posting png’s of twitter instead of direct linking