You can Rebirth toons to have their playtime remain. It’s deceiving.
But yeah, 3.8k paragon is literally every waking hour since game came out farming 4mans.
Honestly just buy the bot for paragon, buy THud for pushing, or just accept that this is what D3 is now.
Idk, plenty of us have fun without it, but this is NOT NEW. It’s been this way for countless seasons. Blizz doesn’t care, so you shouldn’t, or pay up.