The problem is how best to expose those and 100,000 other potential buttons to the user who has better things to do than "navigate".

An obvious solution is a search box, but most sites also have terrible search functionality, so users have learned to ignore it. For the rare gem that has useful search, dressing it up as a chatbot could get people to actually try it. Too bad it looks like a lot of devs are just dressing up their shitty search as chatbots, so users are being trained to ignore them as well.