Is this as popular as I want it to be

Also what boosts online multiplayer games most is possibility of Clans and E-Sports.
Enlisted doesn’t have any of that yet, so game will continue to suffer small playerbase.

Thing is a lot of players just sit on the hangar with the game open instead of playing.

Or are bots / artifical number that always adds +XX% to actual player numbers.

According to some gossips they are using deep learning AI (or other that I don’t remember). If its truth, AI squads are perfectly reasonable .
Of course it’s only a gossip as far as I know.