I always felt like streaming in the post-covid era was a massive bubble waiting to be popped. View counts and subs/donos/superchats reasonably should've dropped off noticeably after covid lockdowns ended. The average viewer also likely has less free income to spend on subs/donos/superchats since cost of living has gone up in the past few years as well. It feels like our economy shouldn't be able to handle thousands people getting paid thousands of dollars just to stream themselves playing vidya even when considering it's only the top 1% of streamers that actually have any significant viewcounts and income.
I wouldn't be surprised if Twitch was tolerating this botting for a while so they could have good numbers to show the shareholders.