The point is only reasonable when divorced from all context of Trump's Russian contacts, Russia's interest in getting sanctions overturned, Russia's known past disinformation campaigns, DNC hacking, wikileaks, etc. Within the proper context it is entirely unreasonable to even posit some other actor working to influence the election.
But the claims are no longer that Russia manipulated social media to get votes for Trump specifically. Therefore any Trump/Russia link is irrelevant to the current narrative, which is that "someone" is using "bots" to generically "sow division".
None of these claims have any actual evidence backing them, and when claims can be sourced the sources collapse under examination; see my article above.
But we shouldn't need to deeply analyse academic papers to see that this narrative is nonsense. It is just not internally consistent. Putin had clear reasons to want Trump to win, that I accept. So why would his staff post things supporting Clinton? There is no logic to this idea whatsoever, and it's not where the narrative started.