I think this takes away from the professionalism of these individuals. At a certain level, we are all doing things we want to be doing, otherwise we would be looking for ways to do other things. If you follow a lot of top eSports players in LoL challenger, for example, they all love the game, but you can tell the difference in professionalism even in their online personas towards the game. There's no doubt QTPie loves the game, but it's also no secret that the reason he isn't a top tier ADC anymore is because he doesn't want to deal with the grind and just wants to enjoy himself (and more power to him for it -- this isn't a character judgement, just pointing out the difference)

Most probably love the game, but having been a semi-professional CS player myself in the past, it very much feels like "work" sometimes.

> it's what you would do anyhow if you weren't being paid for it.

Much different scrimming for fun or playing matches with your buddies/team mates/pub stomping versus practicing very detailed specifics or scenarios, or testing different team compositions and strategies over and over and over again.