Why are the communities of competitive games so notoriously toxic? Culture. I think books could be written about the 'cultures' of certain games, but basically, the culture of competitive games places too much value on rank and prowess. And this has a few consequences.
People react to this cultural pressure in different ways. The way we see this most often is people throwing temper tantrums at teammates for poor performances - the logical end-result if someone's worth is largely based off of how well they play. Or maybe they feel cheated of a rank, or number, because the matchmaker put them with someone who they consider lesser. This is a direct insult to them - seeing the game subtract from what literally defines their worth because of someone else feels awful.
This is where what I call de-'sweating' comes in. It doesn't seem to me that there is competition for the thrill of it anymore, but merely to dunk on the other dude across the screen. I don't know realistically how this happens, but the emphasis needs to move, or we get situations where kids sling racial slurs at each other because they couldn't win, and taking that therefore as an insult to their self-worth. Or burning themselves out at age 19 playing 9 hours a day trying to improve to a certain level, so they feel better about themselves.
Ladder anxiety is another common manifestation of this. But that's not the main concern, which is that the laser focus within these communities on your ability to play the game well, and not on competition itself or sportsmanship, fosters the awful environment within these games. De-'sweating' just means rank doesn't matter. It should be a tool for fostering fair competition and even play.
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The PC peripheral market is absolute trash and for example paying a small premium for a mouse+kb combo that doesn't suck is actually quite important for daily use. The problem here is that quality PC peripherals got shoved to the gaming market because businesses don't want to invest on that shit. If it were up to them you'd be using your old mouse with ball and Office 2002 on a fucking CRT monitor for all they care. The only people wanting to spend on quality setups are people that need it for their jobs, I mean as a professional requirement(e.g CGI farms) or individual content creators, otherwise the only real reason is entertainment because as I said, you don't need a 27in 1440p 120hz monitor for Excel.
So I would not approach it from this angle, I think historically the gaming market is what drives demand so of course they are pandering to gamers, but as I said if every businesses actually bothered with giving people decent peripherals then they wouldn't have to. I'd also say "extremely profitable" is an exaggeration since it is basically 2-3 corporations that make everything and they are not that big, look at Corsair and COVID they reported like 50% yoy growth.
Why? Not because people are suddenly considering themselves "pro gamers" but because having decent peripherals is essential to working at home comfortably and most people don't look at a $30 mouse and be like "hummm great I'll have that", people are definitely willing to pay even a small premium for that comfort, and believe me the comfort is real you don't want to use shitty PC hardware as some form of praxis.
Good CRTs from the early 2000s literally could do 1440p, 120hz, low latency with better color than any LCD.
Infinite contrast like AMOLED too