I agree with your last part, in fact the original AI was good enough to fill for a HGC pro and make game changing plays when a player disconnected and no pauses were left:
Then it gradually got worse with each patch, they hired a biology major to work on it in 2020, then funding for the game stopped and the feature just got abandoned.
Now the AI is in a much worse state than 7-8 years ago and nothing will be done about it as the game is no longer actively developed
