Also Tencent owns a portion of Activision Blizzard. That would be my guess for who is pulling the strings behind this specific incident.
With respect to Twitch placement, since when Twitch is a benchmark for number of Players in a game worldwide ? HS lost momentum because of the greedy economy of the game and because other games surged.
Another source for the subject: https://www.kotaku.com.au/2019/10/in-post-game-interview-hea...
Meanwhile in Overwatch, they've made a point of a diverse cast and canonically made several characters gay/bi, upsetting plenty of far-conservatives. (all of which is excellent, of course) Hell, Starcraft literally features storylines about revolutionaries fighting a dictatorship.
I get that game politics are different than real-world politics, and they have to draw the line somewhere, but it's a little conspicuous where they've chosen to draw the line.