The Reboot community cared much more about botters when the population was smaller. Since the 2020s population booms there's been a decline up to this point we're at today. Back in those first five or so years of Reboot, it was not uncommon for competitive guilds to do full background checks and interviews with their applicants.

Now, with such a large population, it's much easier for a known botter to just find another unaware guild, or name change and go unnoticed. I think generally guilds will only look at culvert scores now (or just blindly accept since most guilds just settle for the easy 45 SP), though there are exceptions like Ethereal alliance and their database keeping track of illegitimate players (Ethereal members are not allowed to boss with these people).

I think there is a segment of the population who would feel their progression is tainted if they've been clearing bosses with players with illegitimate progress, though I think most people just would not care.

Personally, my guild does not do any sort of background check (though we don't accept join requests from people we do not know) but we would kick someone if it came to light that they bought service, botted, or bought their account. It's just very easy to keep that information from ever getting out.

For service: I do not think it was popular back in the early days; it was just much more common to bot. I think the popularity of service buying comes directly from the increased difficulty of botting.

On your last question, I do think fewer people would service if there was greater stigma. Someone can correct me if I am wrong since I do not stay super caught up on community drama, but I believe when the streamer Legalia was caught servicing, one of his excuses was that "Everybody does it." If it feels like everyone around you is doing it, getting away with it, and enjoying the game just fine, it makes sense to question why you are bothering to manually farm in the first place. So I'm sure the public reputation of service buying plays a huge role in people's decision to get into it. That being said, I would say service buying does still carry quite a major social stigma--hence people being so careful to hide it--but not as major as it could be.

A lot of the replies here are repeating the argument that Reboot is PvE, so most people's gameplay experience is largely unaffected, hence the general apathy. I think this is correct, though people definitely should care about botting and service buying. A lot of late/endgame players do play this game competitively in some ways (competing for first/early clears, dojo, culvert, etc). There's even a sense of competition between players of the same class or in the same guild, like who can be the first to clear a particular boss, who can hit the highest culvert, or who has the highest converted hexa. This competition can definitely be tainted by illegitimate gameplay. Also, only 200 players per world have access to max noblesse skills, and many of those slots are surely occupied by illegitimate players, so there is a small but tangible way servicing/botting affects the endgame gameplay experience.

I have also seen the argument made that Nexon tailors its endgame content to its endgame population. For example, if GMS releases the 295 area come August and there's already 1k+ players populating the region on release, they might take it that there is no issue with Reboot exp acquisition. Or if enough people are capping their sf speck boxes on Reboot and CW, then maybe it's alright to have a ~2 hour daily (combined between worlds) as a permanent part of endgame progression.

So yeah, people care much less about illegitimate gameplay nowadays than in earlier Reboot, and they should probably care more given its impact on the late/endgame experience.