I have a fairly healthy diet, with little risk of diabetes, but sweeteners screw my digestion up. They are now in so many things that it’s hard to avoid them, especially in soft drinks and mixers. For the rest of the world that doesn’t eat an American diet, the balance of the risk presented by sugar vs diabetes is not as one-sided as all that
There are loads of those. Like tons, from all around the world. “Big sugar” really, really isn’t much of a thing outside the us, and a lot of these studies are either data-aggregation from larger groups of studies, like this one, or studies over long periods of large groups, like most of those referenced in that article, particularly those covering Coronado and kidney disease.