I think the rule was made without foreseeing the possibility of a team turning down a Paid Bid. I mean, who does that? In the usual course, if you have an At Large, you are looking to move up to a Paid. And if you already have a Paid, you are not listed as in the "running" for the Paid Bids at that completion. The wording of the rule should be changed for next year to make it clear that if a team accepts a Paid Bid, that is when it kicks in that athletes are now bound to the second team and cannot go back to the first team with the Paid Bid.
It is the first year of this rule, so I can see how this happened (innocently or not, I don't know). But the lesson is -- if you have an injured team member when the team is going for a Paid Bid, you need to look for substitutes from "lower" teams (not teams with Paid Bids already). Once an athlete earns a Paid Bid, they should be hands-off for substituting at bid events. That may mean the team going for the bid needs to use a sub from a non-worlds team, even a L4 athlete. Or the other option is to not use a sub, and re-work your routine. In prior years, coaches were able to grab a substitute from another Worlds team at their gym. This is no longer the case.
So, knowing why this rule was instituted and what it is meant to prevent, do you think next year we will see some teams trying to get around it by having some athletes be on Team B early and get a Paid Bid, and then go to Team A and get a Paid Bid, tying them to Team A, which is what they want because Team A is known to be the better team? In other words, reverse of what we expect to happen. The "lesser" Worlds team at a gym getting a Paid Bid first, and then the "flagship" team from that gym getting a Paid Bid later?