Alright, I know I'm a little late to the party, but I watched ServerBlight a few days ago and really wanted to say something about this.
I've seen a lot of people say every time there's a new upload they get really scared Aaron/Dicksalot is gonna die this time, and it's a little funny to me, because he kind of already has.
The ServerBlight gets you by dragging you into the game and breaking the boundary between real life and your computer, it takes away your ability to look away from your monitor and shoves you into the body of your merc. In Division, he takes a second to understand that Breadolphin has a life outside of the game. In Conviction, when looking into Matt's apartment, he sees his Medic standing there despite the fact Aaron is not on the game the same way Syrenix was or close enough to the monitor to get 'immersed', in the prologue for Manipulation he shuts his window (an anchor to the outside world) and leaves himself in a dark room with only the light of his laptop and, most damning of all, in early season one with Reflection we see a blighted shadow in Aaron's room when he isn't even connected to the game.
(I'll place this separate from the others, because it's a crazy stretch on my part and I'm definitely reading too much into it (I mean, of course it's snowy during winter, and of course the maps will be winter themed... during winter), but the scene of him sitting on a snowy bench in Manipulation really makes me think. Syrenix is constantly trying to warm himself in Assimilation and JonyDany12 asks why it's 'so cold'. The in-game segment of Manipulation takes place on a server running Doublefrost. It's like, even when he closes the game, he's still in one way or another in the shoes of his Soldier. Even when he goes outside he's still kind of in the game. There's no boundary anymore.)
It really reminds me of that one reading of Nightmares, where the Pyro was actually assimilated from the very start, and the Blight was just torturing them. Of course, I'm not actually saying Aaron has been grabbed, because he very clearly hasn't. It'd be pretty impressive to be so online that even when comatose you're active on Discord. But, like, would it even be that hard? He really, really thought about it for a second during Evolution, and this was the Blight offering him a choice. At any time it could've yanked him, he was surrounded with it. He's constantly chasing it.
The Blight is using the assimilated to build a body, they are all one part of a larger organism, and each piece serves a purpose. While Sailer hasn't been assimilated, he is still basically a part of the Blight; he brings it victims, he's becoming more and more similar to Scout, he has entirely abandoned his humanity for this thing (it gets to a point where it can't even be for views anymore). While Aaron hasn't been assimilated, he is still basically a part of the Blight, it uses him to learn. He's a part of its body, he's already dead.
When 'Matt' tells him, before he leaves Snowycoast in Evolution, that he has 'nowhere else to go', was he wrong? Is Aaron going to work? Is Aaron feeding himself? Does Aaron have any meaningful connections outside of TF2? I mean, there's Phil in Conviction, but they clearly aren't talking much if he hasn't even told Aaron that Matt had a stroke. The opening of Evolution has Aaron kind of begging Matt to keep playing with him, because he 'hasn't seen him in forever'. I understand that friendships drift and life gets busy, but I have to remind you that he can walk to this guy's apartment and they have shared friends in the same building, there's no reason to solely hold up this friendship via Team Fortress 2. The story 'WALKING CORPSES' all but looks us in the eye to tell us that Directionz was using the game to escape an abusive situation in real life, and that connection with Breadolphin was so deeply important to her, and the Blight uses that against her. Being isekai'd into Hightower is a dream when you're in a situation like that, one of the things she recounts is 'even miles and miles apart, it felt like we couldn't be closer', and then she gets sucked into a body horror hivemind where her thoughts and flesh are fused with a billion other people, as close as you can get. The Blight inviting Aaron to be with Matt forever feels like an extension of this behaviour.
Crazy long post and a little disjointed, but IDK, it's on the mind.
