You resell a game, bundling a botnet proxy inside, and make it freemium: free if you accept T&C with a service allowing using your device connection for research purposes (or whatever wording could be even more confusing), or pay $20.

It's no longer a botnet, it's a "residential proxy" and you are doing clean business.

Trillion dollar AI companies use/used these to scrape the Internet. You don’t want to smear their good names do you?

Its to distinguish them from traffic that originates from someone spinning up a thousand VPS instances in a datacenter. Its very easy to block data center addresses, but hard to block residential addresses without impacting real customers.

No one is talking about the issue being proxies. The issue is that they are surreptitiously-created proxies, with the full extent of consent consisting of one sentence buried in a massive EULA that no can be expected to read, by design.

There is another word for a C2 channel being created within a device you own without your knowledge, and that word is malware. And it's most often used for botnets, which is the least malicious thing they are used for.