That would be awful, presuming that the artificial friends are not people.
Separately, you might like Count to the Eschaton by John Wright with its ultimate project being "the sophistication of all matter".
Just as human intelligence is merely one form of intelligence, human companionship will be merely one form of companionship. AI friends will offer a new type. And for the masses it's going to feel very real and very legitimate. They'll like their AI friends as much or more than they like their human friends.
And the fake friend explosion can happen first quietly, which eliminates the initial shame phase problem. Nobody will have to know you have fake friends, or how much you interact with them. Until it's common it'll be viewed as shameful (pathetic, proof of social ineptness) and mocked by society, then it'll be normalized. This idea isn't novel, it's extremely obvious and right now we're just waiting for a few pieces of the LLM puzzle to get to the point where they're good enough to facilitate high quality artificial friends.
It'll happen shockingly rapidly when it sparks; slowly at first and then in the span of 3-5 years we'll go from nobody having or being willing to admit to having artificial friends, to everybody openly discussing it. It will then seem more odd to not have artificial friends, like people that refuse to own smartphones or use the Internet. People will start commonly referring to their artificial friends by name in conversations with other human friends. These behaviors will become entirely socially normal.
"Yeah I had Alice clean the house before I went on vacation." Every major personal robot, every artificial friend, will get a name. Humans name their vehicles, so they're definitely going to name their $10k-$20k house bot and the artificial friends they spend large amounts of time with. When you go on a long drive (etc), your artificial friends will be there to keep you company, and they will remember your life events as well or better than you do (if you give them access to that recording/memory capability).
huh. I can only think of one friend I've ever known who named their car.
Anyways, not saying I necessarily disagree with the rest of what you say, but it's out there, for sure. We're a good distance away from an AI that can meaningfully act like a friend.
(Though who knows what AI will look like in even 10 years? I'm not ruling this out)
Apple, Amazon and Clarke started the trend.
And I am presuming that the companionship that people need is the companionship of other human beings. Otherwise, tamagotchi, fish, cats, dogs, parrots, and horses are already perfectly good companions. AI can help fill in for some of those other ones (tamagotchi especially), but it cannot replace human companionship.