And Twitch are well known for applying their rules fairly and consistently, to streamers big and small.
/s
At this point the divergence between the rules-as-written and rules-as-applied(-in-each-case) has become so apparent that I'd treat Twitch's help pages like comments on a decades old poorly maintained code base - any match between them and reality is almost accidental and cannot be relied upon.
From what I have seen this is indeed Twitches prescribed approach, even for small streamers. I had a friend that was getting viewbotted when his channel was just starting to grow and remember being surprised he was worried it'd actually make him look bad to viewers (like he himself was trying to inflate his channel since his chat was dead vs the view count) but never worried Twitch was going to do anything to his account for it.
Have you seen different for this topic or is that a generic reaction for any time Twitch help pages are linked?
Agreed in general but for bots it anecdotally seems to be the case. For example Massan was blatantly viewbotting for a long time but he wasn't banned for several months at least (I don't remember the time).
At this point the divergence between the rules-as-written and rules-as-applied(-in-each-case) has become so apparent that I'd treat Twitch's help pages like comments on a decades old poorly maintained code base - any match between them and reality is almost accidental and cannot be relied upon.