We cannot assume this is the case, [...]
I wasn't assuming anything. I was repeating what I think is the "official story".
There is one aspect of that story that's still bothering me (well there is more than one TBH, but I'm trying to pretend now that it's true). They said the the rogue employee "had to chose manually which player to cheat". How did he do that if he didn't have access to the production database? Some kind of a backdoor in the UI? All we've seen was two or three lines of code that don't really explain much. I think at the very least DB should have published the whole commit. This is one of those things that would have gone a long way towards credibility.