That is a good question and for that we will need to pull out the graphs of accounts banned from this years Fanfest 2022
To be honest with you, I see no correlation between the amount of accounts banned for Botting or other violations and the sometimes lower amount of players online. I think it has more to do with the real world situation, as pandemic is slowly going away and people are spending more time on different activities rather than video games.
Especially, the numbers of the suspended accounts are kinda huge, but when we brake it down to what we have said at Fanfest, the bigger portion of those numbers where actually not players, they were those sophisticated bot farms that were in the game just for one purpose, generating ISK to be sold on the back market. The same goes for fraudsters, they create accounts not to play the game but to move the stolen goods to the buyers and etc.
So while the suspended numbers are kinda huge, the amount of suspended actual players (and here I am speaking of those players who are / were active members of the EVE Online community) are relatively low and do not explain the sometimes lower amount of players online.