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I’d assume they’re not actually paying for these attacks and have access to a large botnet, which would imply no cost (outside of hours spent constructing the attack) to the adversary, right?

They might be renting the botnet.

A DDoS can be rented for less than $100/mo depending on how much bandwidth you want to flood. Remember, they're compromised machines; you're not paying for egress bandwidth.

Are most machines involved in attacks like this compromised? Are we talking generic consumer desktop machines, like my grandma’s old XP desktop running in her basement?

> Are most machines involved in attacks like this compromised?

Yes

> Are we talking generic consumer desktop machines, like my grandma’s old XP desktop running in her basement?

Those combined with hundreds of thousands of compromised VPSes, etc.

And don’t forget the millions of IoT devices.

If they're using a botnet of compromised servers then I suspect the marginal cost is negligible.

It could also be seed investment to see who is likely to pay up. ROI comes from second attack.