Streaming left. What stayed?
The commissioning boom is over. The infrastructure it built is still standing, and it belongs to people who were not there at the start.
When the international platforms slowed their African commissioning, the first round of commentary was elegiac. The second round was smug. Both missed what had actually been left behind.
What was left behind is capacity. Crews who have now worked to an international delivery spec. Producers who have negotiated a chain of title. Colourists, supervisors, line producers, and a generation of ADs who came up on well-funded sets.
Capacity outlives capital
That capacity does not evaporate when a commissioning budget moves. It looks for work, and in looking for work it lowers the cost and raises the floor of everything made locally afterwards.
The question worth asking is not whether the platforms come back. It is who owns the next thing these people make.