No, a huge amount of coverage has been devoted both to trying to prove they exist and that they influenced elections or referendums.

I dug into this extensively at the time. A very large number of accounts being labelled as "bots" or "Putin trolls" turned out to be real people who lived in the west, when investigated by people who weren't under the spell of the conspiracy theory.

For example this guy who was accused of being a professional Russian troll but turned out to be a security guard in Glasgow:

https://www.scotsman.com/news/politics/im-not-russian-troll-...

Or this one that identified the official account of the Russian embassy as a "Twitter bot".

https://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/russia-used-web-posts-to-...

You can tell it's a conspiracy theory because it's filled with stupid internal contradictions, like that Times article which claims the Russian accounts are both human and "cyborg", which they define as "automated but with human involvement" (which is it and why automate if you still need human involvement), or that the posts are simultaneously pro-Brexit and also pro-Remain:

Most of the tweets seen by this newspaper encouraged people to vote for Brexit, an outcome which Russia would have regarded as destabilising for the European Union. A number were pro-Remain, however, suggesting that the Russian goal may have been simply to sow division

That's something that comes up a lot. Journalists and lefty politicians claim "Russia" is trying to push all kinds of random policies they disapprove of, like Brexit. Yet when investigated these supposed bot accounts always turned out to have a wide variety of opinions, which is why the narrative eventually changed to generic "sowing division".

Another common theme is that Twitter accounts get fingered as bots based on nothing at all:

https://www.bbc.com/news/technology-41982569

Bot-spotting tips. The Atlantic Council's Digital Forensic Research Lab (DFRL) offers social-media users tips for spotting a bot:

Frequency: Bots are prolific posters. The more frequently they post, the more caution should be shown. The DFRL classifies 72 posts a day as suspicious, and more than 144 per day as highly suspicious.

Anonymity: Bots often lack any personal information. The accounts often have generic profile pictures and political slogans as "bios".

Amplification: A bot's timeline will often consist of re-tweets and verbatim quotes, with few posts containing original wording.

Common content: Networks of bots can be identified if multiple profiles tweet the same content almost simultaneously

One influential account that these bots retweeted, which claims to be based in the Isle of Wight, now has the handle @davidjobrexit. In August The Times identified it as a probable Russian propaganda account because it tweeted the Kremlin line during Moscow office hours, among other indicators

Moscow office hours is GMT+3, i.e. same as European office hours. So these criteria describe 90% of Twitter.

The fact that they can't even pick a coherent motivation for the proposed conspiracy makes it one of the most pathetic such theories of our time, yet amazingly it's totally convincing to metropolitan centre-left types. The very same people who decry how easily the masses are fooled by misinformation and conspiracy theories.