Well the thing is you, and I've heard plenty others say it's "bad", but I never really hear why it's so bad. I honestly think it's a positive. The reality is as you said, curation is hugely time consuming, and there's a ton of stake that wants to participate, but doesn't have the time to manually curate. What is the actual material damage of this that you see?
I think things like curation trails saved Steem from dying for a long time, and I feel like it's still a similar situation here.
I think what we need most desperately right now is still more users and I don't think this will move us closer to that. I think it would have the opposite effect.
We're not talking about curation trails. Those are arguably still manually curated, because someone is reading the posts before voting, hopefully.
The "bad" auto-voters are the ones that just vote around 5 minutes on posts by a specific set of authors that are expected to generate content that won't get downvoted. It's bad because no one is judging the contents of the article in that case. Right now, variations of this type of bot are probably the most economically rewarding.