I didn't say linear rewards is the cause of the bidbots but I do think linear rewards while it had good intentions, had the opposite effect. It seemed to work in the beginning but then somehow human beings stopped curating and bots took over. With the bots now it doesn't work at all.
Linear rewards don't seem to work unless you can prove each account is human controlled and that all curation is done by actual brains and not bots. Linear rewards without KYC level verification of accounts is what led to the situation now I think. A whale could game the system before but we could see it, while now a whale can game the system in ways we cannot see it because any small account could be owned by the same whale.