They are not hurting the cause but its skews the picture.
Take me, as soon as I learned about Peakd or Ecency, I switched to those frontends and haven't touched hive.blog in years x)
So even if I am here everyday, its not counted in the graph above ^^
I also seems like Steemit have a lot of bots still, bidbots, vote for vote bots, properly AI making boys etc.
So it might be higher on Steemit site compared to hive, we do also have bots. But not to the same degree as Steemit x)