The entire online ad industry where they pay per click is fundamentally flawed anyway.

While having bots click the links automates the process, it's essentially no more fraudulent than those mobile games that reward you for clicking on ads or watching videos. Nobody is really paying attention, they're just clicking to get whatever the game is rewarding them.

Ultimately there's no way to measure the "quality" of the click, as in whether or not the person clicking it is even paying attention, and it's also easy to outright fabricate clicks, which I believe Google has been accused of doing in the past.