I dont think Apex is dying anytime soon.
The old internet wisdom : "If you dont pay for a product, you are most likely the product" also applies to Apex.
The (pardon my french) "freeloaders" nowadays are only needed to keep the queue times low for the 5-10% of the Playerbase that actually brings in the money.
In the Beginning Respawn needed the player numbers to generate the hype, but nowadays ... not anymore.
With the introduction of those NPC bots, Respawn can give the paying customer a decent experience and most of them would not even realize they wont face real opponents anymore, heck ... they even could do fake ingame voice chats at one point to give the player the illusion of playing against real life opponents.
Next step could be taking Apex off the Steam Store (after dropping Apex on SteamDeck, is it needed anyway ?), so the "haters" cant talk numbers anymore ... and by then nobody on the outside will ever know how many real players are ingame.