I think this is pretty much obvious, at least before the appeals process. I mean, let’s just take a quick look at the numbers:
240k in about 22 days, that’s about 80k per week. If a standard work week has 40 hours, that’s 2k per hour. So if three entire minutes were dedicated to “research” on average per account, they’d need a team of 100 people whose only job is researching potential bot accounts. That’d be insane, and 3 minutes isn’t much time anyway.
When they post those kinds of numbers they are pretty much telling you that they don’t personally research bans, it’s some kind of automation. Maybe it’s not 100% user reports, maybe there’s some other method that they use, but whatever it is it is programmed and not handled personally.
And even if only 1% of those banned accounts submit appeals, if they expect a single employee to handle those appeals, even if they give them literally zero other work, they’d have about 3 minutes per appeal if they don’t want to fall behind. They probably instead subcontract bot ban appeals to some third world call center style operation, whoever is the lowest bidder, and the experience a player would have with them is probably little better than talking to a bot. In any case, Blizzard is banning at such a frantic rate where I don’t see how they could possibly keep up quality.