You misunderstand. The costs are passed to consumers, not the profits.
So the “cost” of the commissions are passed to the consumers.
That is not how the poorly educated “journalists” wrote it.
When I read that “commissions were passed to party X”, that reads as though ‘party X’ GOT the commissions; not that the App publisher/developer’s “cost” for the commissions paid to Apple were paid by - passed on to - the consumer.