Honestly shocked you were willing to wait that long. I guess if I saw the notification, I would, but my email is mostly a place to store spam. If it's not there in three days tops, I stop checking. That is a solid issue, and it's not like any instance has the manpower atm to delegate approvals to a person/team as a full-time job (which it absolutely would be).
I have to admit, seeing the influx of bots on some lemmy instances makes me nervous about Ernest keeping ours open. It's really the best defense right now and despite the comparable lack of content I've been breathing pretty easy not having seen one single bot in two weeks now.
No astroturfing yet. No vote manipulation. That "vaccines cause autism" bot poster I used to see all the time is still on reddit. I think I've seen someone being a shithead twice. Any reposts are people crossposting to other instances or just trying to transfer content here.
But the only way to keep it this way for good is not the kind of culture the internet currently has. Checking everyone's ID at the door would mostly solve the bot issue that made reddit an untrustworthy, insufferable plague, but in practice it'll make people look elsewhere. They haven't been raised to wait.
Having some open instances for the noobs and some walled gardens for anyone sick of it may be the best we can do. Unfortunately, they would have to be very walled, basically only federating with each other. Their necessary pushback would make them seem like snobby elites to non-members and like very tantilzing targets for ad companies to worm into or destroy.