I would rather have a bot written stub than nothing at all when I search in Wikipedia. Like it is mentioned in the story, some subjects are under represented while others are super saturated.
It also doesn't always really help in jumpstarting future improvements, if the structure doesn't align with the granularity that makes sense for an encyclopedia article. For example if there is a genus with three species, each of which is very similar and has very little distinctive written about it, the normal organization would be to write one article on the genus, with a short discussion of each subspecies in the main article, not broken out into three separate duplicative and near-empty articles. You'd only break out into separate articles on each species if there's enough to write about them that covering them as a group becomes unwieldy (this varies widely by species). If I were to hazard a prediction, it's that the English Wikipedia will as a result tend towards better organized species coverage than the Swedish Wikipedia, which will never get around to reorganizing these articles.
The value-add is that I know about Wikipedia, but not about whatever more authoritative botanical site you're mentioning.
I assumed Google already recognized these near-duplicates and are penalizing them