Well, I would agree that this is the goal, but I think the goal is largely dependent on advances in technology that have not been accomplished. I understand that economists are predicting collapse, but predicting collapse and manufacturing it so that it will be controllable, are too different things. A crash can happen organically. These experts could be recognizing an organic collapse, but manufacturing a collapse requires consideration of how the workforce will be affected.
They have shot themselves in the foot over the last hundred years in many ways. Electricity is not free even if that was a theory introduced by Tesla. This possibility was shot down in order to make a profit. Because of something like this alone, just maintaining networks for communication and electricity requires a workforce that is difficult to put in jeopardy with a financial collapse. An economic collapse and any severe depopulation attempt could literally shut power down and communication networks and whoever would be alive would be living like it was 1850 all over again. A large workforce is the entire reason that we have all the accommodations that we do in the modern world. A large workforce is still a requirement to maintain this. So the reality is that they need us more than we need them.
In theory, you would have artificial intelligence supplement this by maintaining networks and other things that are required to power our modern world, but there is no artificial intelligence that exists that doesn't require human supervision. Robots are not able to create solutions to problems if they cannot access a preexisting solution from memory.
This may have been the goal at one point, but it was a presumptuous one. Alan Turing was introducing the possibility of artificial intelligence in the early years of computer science development. He actually wrote an interesting paper on this.
https://www.csee.umbc.edu/courses/471/papers/turing.pdf Basic was one of the earliest programming languages and it was created to accommodate artificial intelligence development. So it is clear that this was a potential goal at one point. However, if this is not something that is realized in a way that can supplement the loss of the workforce, it will create a delay or a premature deployment of a plan to collapse the economy or implement anything that would cause a dramatic decrease in the population that has the potential to pull the architects of a plan like this down with the ship.