No, that's not true.
I've been botting since before ROS, when Paragons were capped at 100 and legendary items sucked, and I have always had friends. Mind you, I did remove all non-essential friends and untrustworthies.
With the new "appear offline" mode(requires battlenet client) it's safer than ever to have friends as long as you appear offline while you're asleep/at work. Being in a clan however is not a great idea.
You can be lucky or not, in my case only two bots with ppl on list got banned, the other two without any listed ppl run fine. If it is expensive to pay for a bot for you, not use it and otherwise life is to short to do all work by hand..bot is finding materials and the higher greater rifts you do by yourself or as you wish