You can be emotionally affected without being fooled. Just like with other types of art. Indeed there is a lot of capital and marketing behind it, but that's true of other types of art too (like, idk, American war movies). You said "I'm always amazed that people feel anything when chatting with an AI bot", I am just trying to take away your amazement by pointing out the similarity with other cases in which people feel things due to art or entertainment.

By the way, you also said "Don't people realize it's a machine "pretending" to be human?" so I don't think it's true that as you now say "I never said AI itself is pretending".