they invested time and money into it and are engaged in the chat community and because of that community and parasocial relationship with the streamer that occasionally might engage with them the feeling of temporarily not being alienated ultimately drives them to go to great lengths to double down and defend both bad political positions and just bad human beings who are streaming because they don't want to go back to feeling alone and miserable, which they inevitably will have to go through to just deal with reality. i went through this a while back and unfortunately know IRL people like that and a bunch of unnamed online weirdos like that. the only ones who benefit out this system are the streaming platform owners and the streamers themselves and capitalism certainly promotes the worst types of voices to the top of the pyramid, so its no wonder a bunch of counter-revolutionary fake socialists propped up while the legit communist and anarchist streamers get blocked off the recommended list and banned for silly minor offences all the time, which is not to say many of those don't also have toxic echo-chamber cult-like environments that they maintain but at least some have slightly better modes of analysis and theory and do some research though I'm soured on the concept of petit-borgeous streaming businesses as a way to do anything apart from org fundraising at this point