It means hard work, but not in a good sense, it's similar to "extorting" hard work from someone. It translates, roughly, into forced work. I'm Slavic, so I'm translating directly without google translate.
You created a straw-man argument. A textbook example. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Straw_man
Please, be kind.. you don't need to belittle someone and look for ways to disagree. The author is not unreliable narrator.
Also, you didn't even bother to read or comprehend what we're arguing about. The commenter labels author unreliable narrator because his google search provided shaky evidence about the meaning of the word, yet he ignores the entire article after the introduction. It's nitpicking and there's no evidence that the person who wrote the negative comment even read the rest of the article.
You're strengthening his strawman argument by providing, yet again, false evidence.
There's more than 1 Slavic language, and given that word "slave" comes from "slavic", you'd think that there's some relation to our elders being aware of forced work and its impact.
> roughly translating to servitude, forced labor, or drudgery.
Robota simply means "work". These two words are as similar in meaning and connotations as words from two different languages can be. FWIK the emotional coloring is completely invented by the author. The fact that they do such thing in the very first paragraph makes them a very unreliable narrator.