Messing up the bot progression in 2042 killed portal for all purposes other than weird hardcore settings, weekly missions and AFK XP grind.
As long as the people do not get matched into player hosted serves via the matchmaking, the bots need to be there or there will be no reason to join the server in hopes that enough players will join to make it functional.
Now if people want bot kils to not count in the profile stats like K/D (or to have a separate Human only Kills and K/D stat), that is another story and has nothing to do with XP