You are right to hold some skepticism around trading bots, the truth is that bots can be very effective but there is a catch, if you do not know how to trade manually then there is little hope that you will make any money even with a trading bot, you need to know how to trade because if you do not then it is going to be impossible for you to actually know if the strategy that the bot is using is profitable or not, so if you were to code a bad strategy into the bot the only thing it will do is to lose money for you at an alarming speed.
That's what I always say to my friends who consider using trading bots, if they don't have any experience trading or they don't know how to do a trade themselves that generates profit then how will they generate that profit in a bot that only follows your instructions, a bot will only be as good as it's owner and the specifications that that person has added to the bot.
And that is the best case scenario, a bot can only be as good as yourself if you can put into code every single aspect of your strategy including your ability to improvise on the fly, and if this is not possible for you due to your inability to put that into the code or because you are not that good at coding then your bot will always be inferior than you, which means the only way for a bot to be profitable is that you are so good at trading that even an inferior version of yourself can make profits in the market, something incredibly difficult to do.
bots have the nature of helping our trading, we cannot possibly have free time 24 hours a day, so bots will help us to earn money. don't be misunderstood that bots will be more proficient in trading. sometimes bots cannot work under certain conditions, therefore manual trading skills are still needed to be successful