everyone is just following the most popular producers and the rest are basically irrelevant.
Just look at the follower counts and how it drops off on any of the popular sites such as YouTube, twitch, patreon etc
We got more consumers than ever, but they're all following the same people, centralizing it even more
Furthermore in a direct to consumer world, incumbency matters way less. People had fewer options pre-internet (whatever was at their local store) and now brands largely compete on quality (reviews/ratings) rather than pure placement and marketing.
The internet enables centralization like never before as everyone all over the world uses the same services just like they're following the same people for entertainment.
Google decided to go with the masses and dumb down the results to only a handful.
Offtopic: The only day I tried a specific search with quotes in duckduckgo and google. Only duckduckgo had it. Makes me wonder what I've been missing using google.