I have checked the list and found that 30 users sent merit to permabanned users. Some of them may not realize it or they sent it intentionally for various reasons, ABCbits and fillippone lead the list by sending 54 and 14 merit. I personally am not surprised why the list is not as long as before, one of the reasons I would say is because many users can actually recognize users who have been permabanned because of the tools they use and some others because of changes in behavior or changes in mindset where they only want to distribute to active users so that it remains in circulation.
The number of people who have sent merits to permanently banned accounts may be higher. Here is a list of the top 30. I can't say exactly how many, but if the full list is published, the number will probably increase and I estimate it to be more than 50. Identifying banned accounts is very difficult. But if you have a lot of merits, you can give merit to high-quality posters instead of looking at user profiles. Because, merit is not for a profile, but for good posts.
How can we even distinguish whether merits were sent before or after the ban? Most of the merit was probably sent while the discussion was active (this is most common with merit sources like ABCbits and fillippone), and the ban came only after some investigation by other members.