I feel like this is at least partially a byproduct of people being told for years and years that their opinion doesn't matter unless they played something "right," or reached some rank/skill threshold. So now everyone just flocks to influencers and pros who are "qualified" to have opinions.

i agree that both phenomena are true, chat demons are real but i've definitely had games i play a lot of where i also follow content creators and they gave me the words to describe my frustrations. but also if im being honest sometimes that was a different form of scrubbery

The flipside to that is the opinion of the intentional disingenuous downplayer trying to manipulate the system