GM’s never ever banned botters, even back in the day. You would flag them as such and forward them on to accounts/Billings. Who could take anywhere between a week to a month to get through the backlog. With the report system all that’s happened is accounts get flagged by random players and sent to accounts/Billings as well. Exact same chain. The only difference is we only flagged accounts we observed botting where modern players spam report everything. Don’t like someone’s tactic in pvp, report. Guild member got the loot you want, report. Someone got to a mining node/rare before you... report.
this creates soooo freaking many false flags that have to be gone through. I mean if people actually used to report function for what it’s meant for... then it would work the exact same as it used to work in vanilla/tbc.