Oh I totally, agree, the kid of a colleague also told his father that he wants to be a streamer, when he told us we all just broke out into roaring laughter in the office. Since he had no idea how to handle it I gave him a few pointers to failed twitch streamers that spend 15 hours a day and still get nowhere and "confessions" of the successful ones that admit it was a mixture between hard work and absolute sheer dumb luck that they blew up.
Either way, it's not just a media phenomenon, the market of barely qualified adviser and coaching jobs out there is teethering on the insane. Our marketing hired some guy to slightly change the color gradient of the paint on our industrial equipment (seriously, no one gives a fuck about the color as long as you don't make it neon pink..) and payed him handsomely multiple 10s of thousands of dollars for what boils down to less than 10 clicks in the design files. I get 3 calls a week of guys that want to tell me how to do my job because they made up a job description for it. I just wonder if both of these developments stem from a singular source or if they are consequences of one another.
Looking back at reality TV, we certainly have made talentless people popular for no reason (see kardashians) or we send failed celebraties into (something like) the wilderness to gawkt at them struggling with only basic anemeties, which would hint at either a need to worship something or a need laugh at perceived superiors - maybe both. You are right that unraveling this is probably impossible here. I'm not sure if it is all bad either, maybe there is genuinly something there for people, I certainly have seen people make good arguments on youtube and the like (but they usually have achieved something before to make that argument compelling across the board), maybe it's just clever snake-oil salesmen employing psycholigical tricks. I don't know, other than I just don't like most of it.