Well, seems to be it's very serious, the case of your friend. However, I think he might stand a chance of making his addiction becomes a career or he can earn money by playing LoL (Coaching-Stream...). So it might not solve the problem of addiction but at least he can earn some money to pay his bills.
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That's a heavy story. Good too hear it's going well now!
You are absolutely right about your theorie. In most cases there are underlying causes. From what i know, rehab in my country does focus on the underlying problems.
If you have a problems or experienced someting heavy in real life you have to process that (its called Coping). You have right and wrong ways of coping. A wrong way is to distract yourself from it and start for example: heavely drinking, maybe drugs or like in your case gaming.. These are ways to avoid the problem, but it wont fix the problem.
an interesting thing to look up about game addiction is (drugs, set and setting theorie)