In an honest world, yes. But this looks like a situation where the sponsors have the power and can use it to fuck over the streamers.

Sponsors probably knew the bots were there and were factoring that into their cost already, but now they can take advantage and pay less. Sponsors will probably argue something like:

“we were lied to and overpaid. We will graciously pay you the same per viewer rate and not reduce the amount to recoup our excess payments for bots in the past.”

And in theory, the rational free market would keep this from happening because sponsors should be competing for content creators (and vice versa), but the sponsors are the ones with the money and structure to win. They will collude (directly or indirectly) in order to pay less. The less-organized content creators will lose.

I don’t see anything in the article that states the attack started that morning. It says that i was “first noticed” early Friday morning:

According to remarks by St. Paul Mayor Melvin Carter, the attack was first noticed early in the morning of Friday, July 25.

I’m not arguing it’s China, just that I didn’t see anything indicating they know when the attack started