Well you should see what happened when replika nerfed their bots, people were extremely upset, as if somebody killed a loved one. You are underestimating the tendency of humans to build connections, and if virtual connections make it easy then why put all the effort to build human ones?

I think that the AI-pretending-to-be-human does not have much future, because if people end up chatting with AIs why not go with the real thing rather than with the only-fans ones. The only-fans creators are training their replacements.