got queued into a fake ARAM game..

So I play league pretty much every day but my wife hasn't played in about a year, but she decided to make a comeback just for fun and we hopped into a aram game together. Queue pops instantly but nothing unusual happens initally, but when we start to loading into the match i notice 2 things:

1: The other players dont have a challenge level indicator (The little icon at the top of the champion portrait)

2: none of the other players have champ mastery (Not unusal in aram) or any challlenge tokens equipped
As the game starts up again theres nothing toooo weird but im still confused about the lack of challenge level, and then people start playing... weird... not just like noob players though, for example when theres no champions on the screen all five enemy members would group up and walk along the exact line that the minions walked? like they were a second minion wave, and every single snowball that was hit they would take after the same interval of time like clockwork??
i got so suspicious at this point that i tabbed out the game and went to dpm.lol to try and view the accounts of the other players but for the first time ever dpm couldnt find any match that i was in on either the live tab or the aram tab for my account, so i checked op.gg and there it showed me and my wife both in my live game but nobody else???????
We finished the game and firstly i didnt have the option to honor anyone except my wife, and all the other players in the lobby couldn't be added, and if you try to view their profile it would always just show up blank. also if you clicked the match history tab after view profile on any of the bots it would take me to my own account match history??????

All things considered, it was a proper aram game that gave pass XP champion mastery/progression challenge progression and counted to my total aram winrate on the account as you can see in picture 2 crazy thing is that these were bots that the league client recognised (By removing them from the honor options) and i just had no idea this was something league of legends did to returning players?!

So Today i learnt that League will put you in a bot game if you queue norms or aram with a returning player giving an easier experience. Weird.