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@Velocio
You should note that firstly I don't regard affiliates as the only possible revenue stream. Things like classifieds fee-for-listing on successful sale, tickets to events, helping to operate community market places all would have small revenue streams for payment processing and basic costs in the 5-10% area (less if I can push down other costs like the payment provider).
There is a risk that affiliate schemes could be circumvented, but it would take a lot of effort on behalf of the client.
They would need to follow every link ahead of rendering, and determine the end destination. Then replace each instance of the original URL with the end destination.
Without operating a centralised system this could mean up to several hundred links per page in the worst case but still tens of links in the best cases.
That would be untenable due to wait times in servicing the entire link chain (an affiliate link is a redirect). And on mobile, it simply wouldn't work (even with 4G as latency issue and TCP backoff still isn't solved).
If they chose to build a centralised store of origin links to destination links then they might be able to overcome the affiliate links, but it would've required a capital investment to do so, ongoing opex costs. That is, it's hard to do, requires real expense, and remains only a temporary workaround (but at least this could work for a while whereas link re-writing in the client by following the redirect chain would not).
So now I've covered how someone might do it and the difficulties involved, let's ask:
Why would they want to?
Affiliate links are the most benign form of advertising in that they track nothing by default.
The third party has no real presence on this site and cannot identify you or what you've viewed just because you've viewed an affiliate link.
Should you choose to click an affiliate link and visit, say, ChainReactionCycles, then they would see you... but only because you visited CRC. At which point the affiliate link is doing nothing more than the shop would do anyway, likely place a cookie to create a shopping cart.
That is... you had no less privacy than if the affiliate link did not exist, the affiliate link doesn't even personally identify you, it simply matches completed sales to original referrer.
The next point is that the stores want affiliate links. You might think that if they have the sale and can avoid paying out 1% of their value that they would. Except, the stores want to build trade and want to build an audience for their trade and affiliate fees do this very well for a very low cost associated with each transaction (no up-front fees).
With affiliate links preserving privacy, being in the interest of both Microcosm and the sellers, and being so technically difficult to circumvent effectively and permanently... I really don't think there's a great deal of risk.
What I'll actually just do:
I will simply put into the API agreement that aside from processing for rendering, that no changes may be made to the content itself (including links).
I'd then deny API access to anyone that does go to the effort of trying (and failing) to strip out affiliate links.