I'm kinda confused as to how you categorize the site.
You said that the site was on automation.
Are you talking about the site being about automation, tactics, and topics?
Or you are talking about a site that uses content that is automatically generated using artificial intelligence?
These are two totally different things.
There are lots of websites that focus on data automation that are doing really well because that's a pretty hot sub niche with a very specific market.
Still, if this was an AI-driven site, this should not be a surprise.
But just like with any kind of technology, there are going to be people who are going to focus primarily on volume.
Basically, they just click on a button and just crank out as many different pages as possible and populate as many different domains as possible.
The old churn-and-burn business model is here to stay.
So this is not really that big of a surprise no matter how large the site gets.
Still, this can be a learning experience, because even if people are still going to try to automate content, I'm sure things are beginning to become so clear now that there are certain best practices that people should focus on.