Could Search Traffic be being labelled Direct in GA? Direct Traffic down 43%?

We've been doing a lot to optimize our SEO and our google numbers look good on the surface.

After an initial drop after the Big SEO update, we've optimized pages, improved speed and hopefully that is part of the reason search traffic is now up for us 35% for last month year over year in GA.

However, we see a huge drop in "direct" traffic and are wondering if this really could be search traffic. Everything on our site that points to direct traffic (Homepage visits, certain subsection visits is up or flat).

In GA, we see page views and traffic from all sources up except for "direct" traffic which is down 43% year over year for last month (this is a view hundred thousand visits as the site gets good traffic. It's a site with news and a forum).

Any idea what might be causing this? I am very confident it is not a drop in real direct traffic as our homepage traffic is up, and our forum index pages (these are the pages people might put in directly). Google Discover is also up.

I've seen some reference to "ghost traffic" or bots? Could that be it?

Or could this be non google search traffic or even search traffic google is missing. Just wondering what this is as search is a big chunk of our traffic. Last year search was 51% of the acquisition traffic and direct 45% . This year it's 65% search mainly because we've lost so much "direct".

If I look at direct traffic over all I see average session duration is up 35% year over year (4 minutes vs 3minutes roughly) so if a bunch of 0 minute bot traffic dropped out that might be an explanation but could we have hundreds of thousands of sessions from bots? Traffic gets over a million users a month 30-50,000 a day.

I want to figure out what this traffic is, but could it be search traffic?