So your admitting that an Autonomous station is not only possible but very real and you have one available to you?
You just finished saying it was a Strawman argument!
I'm saying that mass quantities of full-auto contacts are almost certainly not happening. Yes, of course some folks are running automated, and I'm pretty sure I've run across a few on 6m last summer—endless CQing for 45 minutes overnight, failure to complete calls and going into a 10 minute loop, that kind of thing. When I was playing with it myself I noticed that happening on occasion. I never left it unattended and maybe made 100 or so QSOs that way, probably more as "proof of concept" than anything else. It's buggy and prone to hiccup, plus it's not legal if you let it go unattended. I'd have never once claimed any credit, naturally, but that wasn't an issue since I think I just worked a bunch of stateside or easy western EU stuff on 20 when it was chock-full.
You may not be using it but why do you think others are not?
Like I said, I have no doubt a few folks are using it, and a subset of them are possibly claiming awards off it, but I believe that number is miniscule bordering on statistically insignificant. It's non-trivial to accomplish if you're not fully computer-literate. Have I worked a 'bot? Probably, but I have no idea if the station I called is automated or not, and 99% of the time the QSO progresses normally. If everybody was running bots the problems would become very obvious in short order. When I was experimenting I don't think I got more than 5 or 6 QSOs worked before it started acting up and I had to manually halt TX or change macros, etc. I don't think automating the software is stable enough for use by the hordes and masses. And I can't see the point, quite frankly. I like the mode because it has error correction so no more ESP contacts as I claimed back in the RTTY days.
My wife loves playing Bejeweled Blitz in her down time and I kid her about it sometimes, but she saw me manually working FT8 one afternoon and she said it wasn't much different, and by jove I think she's right. It's a great time killer when I have nothing to do.