Most of the people stick to the GPH scheme, thats very inaccurate. The shuffling is most profitable generally, no matter what you shuffle, thats why GPH per botting char is nothing compared to the shuffled stuff, gained by the bots. And again, this still dependent off the realm you operate: Something like Glyphs for example, worths virtually nothing on Stormscale, you can barely make 2x profit off every Mop herb stack, but on Kazzak they are going very well, and you can make 3-5x profit off every stack. The same apply for gems, too. On Outland, metas are going 120-130g atm, but on Stormscale, they are 200+! So, the final gold gain could be done even without tons of botting, but with smart shuffling and feeding AH, you dont need to recklessly bot some gather accounts 24/7 to make the big cash, but do it smart, there is tons of other options here, beside the bruteforce farming.
I believe it's the coincidence of having so many botters picking up herbalism and mining and then spamming the AH whilst finding out that they'd need to bot 24/7 just to make 5k a day and then they get banned.. while other botters do bot smart and buy those very cheap materials to make other things which sell for me, profiting of the stupidity of other botters who take the highest risk because they want the bot to take care of everything.
What would be a smarter way to use bot for gold instead of farming ores/herbs? I actually don't know haha