It depends on whether you have your own bot network.
I’ve seen channels with 2-3-4 million subscribers that are likely almost all real.
The videos are filled with poor AI content, bad audio, and no real value, but the thumbnails are top-notch.
Then, 100-150 fake accounts leave AI-generated comments, and the top 5-15 comments look super natural.
These comments get enough upvotes to appear at the top (all done by bots). The AI content is made for search engine ranking, done in a clever way.
Do these videos show up on Google? Do the thumbnails get ranked too? I'm not sure about the exact keywords they rank for on YouTube, but on average, they get over 90k views per video. Most of their traffic, around 75%, seems to be real. They make good money from it.
The content isn’t anything you'd be interested in, but an ad plays before any of their videos, so it still works for them.
You don’t need a huge budget to manage 150 bots. You could make better quality content and do something similar.