Let's turn the tables. Imagine instead of an individual doing this, it was a company doing basically the same thing but in reverse. So they populated their site with bots creating fabricated posts and people to drive 'manufactured engagement' from their users, try to reach critical mass, bloat their advertisement appeal, and generally make a bunch of money.

Is it still a felony worth spending years in prison for? I am speaking practically, not ideologically. The main thing this user did was to exploit advertisers paying out on the world's most gameable metric (exactly as our site would be doing in the above example). Yet that, in and of itself, is not a crime, which is why they ended up relying on wire fraud charges.