Who says that Reddit is more active than it ever has been? How are they measuring that?

Statista, Semrush, and GummySearch all coorborate Reddit's self-reporting. I don't have their methodology on hand.

And certainly Reddit corporate does not want to admit that a large percent of the posts are automated

I mean, this is the billion dollar question. If you can find reliable ways to sift real humans from bot activity at the scale of a social media behemoth, you should just do that for a living rather than shitposting incredulity on a Reddit knock-off site.

But by all available measures, Reddit (a website that's always been plagued with bots and spam accounts) has the most real live active users in its history today.

Finally, Reddit used to be producing results that would show up on search engines, and now it’s not.

Google's been fully in bed with Reddit since at least 2022. One could argue that their habit of front-paging Reddit posts was what goosed its activity of late.