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Personally I think you're really underselling how much circumstantial evidence there is against Niemann. Note I'm not saying Niemann is guilty or should be banned or blacklisted but just laying it out. I might get some things wrong, or miss somethings:
As you already have mentioned, Niemann already has a history of cheating. Niemann also as a reputation of being a huge shit-talker and generally unpleasant player. In my personal opinion, he's exactly the kind of guy you would expect to cheat.
Carlsen played 4.g3 in his opening, which as I understand it, is something that Carlsen has never played in OTB tournament chess before. The speculation is that Carlsen played such an unusual line specifically to test if Niemann was cheating. In Niemann's defence here, Carlsen played relatively poorly, perhaps as the result of his unfamiliarity with this line.
Despite Carlsen never playing this line in his career, Niemann claims to have just so happened to prep against that line that very morning.
Here I have to rely on opinions from GMs and experts, but apparently Niemann's post-match analysis of his own play was complete nonsense and suggests incompetence, getting many things completely wrong. Speculation is that Niemann was just playing engine moves, without actually understanding the position or why the engine is suggesting certain moves.
As you mentioned, many, many top level players have voiced their suspicions about Niemann's play, and about Niemann generally. Though other have obviously defended him.
Such a reaction from Carlsen (withdrawing from a tournament) is highly unusual for him, and he generally has good sportsmanship (I know some might contest this). Carlsen has lost to lower rated players than Niemann before and has never had this reaction. Which suggests Carlsen did suspect Niemann of cheating, though Carlsen may obviously be mistaken. To be 100% clear here, Carlsen has made no accusations against Niemann. All he did was withdraw from the tournament, and the chess community has speculated from there. You say he handles losses poorly, which is kind of true, but he never takes it out on his opponents, but on himself.
As you mention, Niemann's rating has risen at an astronomical speed from 2500-2700 in the last year, near record-breaking as I understand it. But many top level players are suspicious of this and that cheating was involved too.
Not really evidence, but the idea that you couldn't find some way to bypass the security is laughable.
In all likelihood this will never get proven one way or another. If Niemann did cheat, the most plausible explanation I've heard is Carlsen's prep getting leaked somehow to Niemann (some have tried to argue this doesn't constitute cheating anyway). In my mostly-worthless-very-casual-chess-player opinion it is probably more likely than not Niemann cheated, maybe ~60% confidence. But this doesn't mean Niemann should have his career destroyed on suspicion.
There's some part of me that harkens back to the old "if you ain't cheatin', you ain't tryin'" adage when thinking about what the consequences should be for mere suspicion. I tend to have a gut instinct that's something in the ballpark of old school baseball ethics (or at least what I think of as old school baseball ethics). Basically, everyone expects that various forms of low-level cheating are ever present, and if you can't catch your opponent cheating, you don't really get to be much more than slightly mad at him. If Niemann cheated in a way that can't be detected, well, you're going to have to learn to deal with whatever he's doing by either improving cheating detection or adapting strategy. If you can't prove that he cheated, tough shit, basically.
From what I understand cheating in chess is pretty much all-or-nothing. As long as you have an opportunity for an unsecured channel, why bother with anything less than having the computer play for you? Strategy won't beat a modern chess engine.
Oh, that makes sense. Not much like sign-stealing then. I suppose this is why different games have different cultures.
To further your baseball analogy, old-fashioned sign stealing is an "acceptable" form of cheating, that everyone does to some extent and is accepted in the culture of the game. What the Houston Astros did was egregious cheating outside of the accepted culture that was universally condemned (except by the MLB, unfortunately).
Any cheating in chess effectively follows example #2 because of how strong chess engines are.
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