There are two claims here: "POF is not really that big", and "Emergent AI clickfraud bots are causing POF's traffic". People who are treating this seriously are assuming that the first claim was the real message, and that the author merely indulged in some whimsy after. I think it more likely that the second claim, the joke, was the point of the article, but there's a lot less to be said about that, and so people who want to say something serious about POF are ignoring it.