Vtubing is fucking brutal. Like in many other forms of entertainment, and with how fast trends appear and disappear and peoples short attention span, if you take a long-ish break, you literally fall off the face of the earth and people forget about you and move on. There are some exceptions of course that get a ton of views / money whenever they show up (mostly previously well established characters), but if you are relatively new, it is literally career suicide. No wonder those faggy IRL celebrities fake drama and pay people to write articles about them when they have nothing going on, just to stay somewhat relevant.
This might explain the shift in certain talents behaviours. They hate it but they HAVE to stream otherwise its over for them.