EDIT: Immaturely commented without reading article in full. Now get the "laundered traffic" issue. Thanks for correcting me. Either way, kept my initial response.

Jamie, I don't understand what you mean by laundered traffic.

The clicks generated by click-baits, advertorials, etc you see on the sites the study mentioned are real, non-bot traffic.

The ads you see there do in fact direct to shell sites, more commonly referred to as "bridge" pages. All these sites do is create a conversion funnel that starts with (for example) priming the reader about "fit girls" and end up in an advertorial for a diet pill.

It's not affiliate marketing per se, as nowadays companies have their own media buyers, but the fact is that businesses that are profitable enough to profit from high volume, high chargeback rates are shady business that are usually very active in affiliate marketing and CPA-networks. AKA, loans, insurance, diet pills, etc.

So yes, it's not affiliate marketing, it's actually shady businesses. But it's easy to make a single business compliant and run "good ads", whereas it's not that easy to make thousands of affiliate compliant. And that's where you see the problem.

These affiliates are the ones that turn to shady tactics and click-baits, etc (which is simple a strategy to increase click-through-rates) to maximize their profit.