What the Dead Internet Theory is not
This creepypasta turned conspiracy had a very clear origin: a Web in which everything we interact with is not human. The tweets replying to your post? Bots. The likes on your Instagram? Bots. Your internet friends with whom you chat daily? Also bots.
What the Dead Internet Theory is NOT about, though, is internet traffic being for the most part the result of bots and automation. The fact that IoT devices are constantly sending packets in the net does not mean the youtuber you usually watch is not real. The fact that scrapers, trading bots, and automated API calls take up quite a bit of the world's bandwidth does not mean all your friends are fake.
The Internet is not the Web.