Rick & Morty season 5, episode 2, called "Mortyplicity," left a lot to mentally process, but the seemingly convoluted decoy antics actually cleared up a long-standing plot hole within the series. Namely, the implication that if Rick has a multiverse full of enemies trying to hunt him down, he would always be fighting for his life.
Rick Sanchez is perhaps the most hated man in most universes, his selfishness and lack of remorse destroying the lives of anyone who's unlucky enough to get in his way - and his inventions and backup plans allowing him to usually escape without facing any consequences. Considering the fact that Rick hops between dimensions on any regular day of the week, it's a wonder how he isn't constantly either fighting or trying to escape from the hordes of enemies he's gathered as a result of his morally questionable antics over the years.
The easy answer is that his intellectual superiority lets him stay one step ahead of everyone else, but until "Mortyplicity," the implications of that concept were never specified. It turns out that Rick, the unscrupulous scientist that he is, invented a handful of decoy families operating on artificial intelligence that serve as scapegoats for anybody that may think to kill him and the Smith family. While it seems Rick never factored in the idea that these decoys would develop meaningful relationships and sentience of their own, it also seems to be the case that this is simply because he didn't care if that was a possibility - as his only real concern was making sure he and his family escaped detection from his enemies.
This isn't the first time that Rick & Morty has tried to address this issue. In "Close Rick-Counters of the Rick Mind," the tenth episode of the overall series, Rick explains that he needs to be near Morty's brain waves in order to hide from his enemies. These "Morty waves," as Rick condescendingly calls them, cancel out his own supergenius brain waves and creates a camouflage effect to hide Rick from those looking for him. However, the Morty brain wave explanation doesn't hold up in the show anymore, as Rick has remained undetected by enemies no doubt actively trying to hunt him down even when he's nowhere near Morty.
Rick's decoy plot reveals a crucial (and ironically hilarious) aspect of the character, too. At first, it looks as if a race of alien squids have finally figured out that Rick is keeping decoy families, but then it's revealed that the squids are, in fact, decoys themselves who are disguised as squids. That means that Rick's decoy inventions are actually effective at protecting him from his enemies. The kicker is that it's Rick's decoys who pose the greatest threat, seeking to kill each other because they all believe they must eliminate the "fake" Ricks. In other words, Rick remains one step ahead of his enemies, but can't seem to outsmart himself. Rick & Morty has proven time and again that Rick is his own greatest enemy, but "Mortyplicity" puts that idea on full, chaotic, bloody display.