> It takes a lot of skill to constantly produce content at the rate that millionaire twitch streamers do.
Well, that's disputable. Most content-sources are delivered externally, in form of games and stuff they can react too. It's not like they sit there and think up something fresh by themselves for 8 hours a day. Though, yes, they have some naturally skill in socializing which they hone over time. But still I would not say it goes beyond the skill of any other natural socializer which exists in any community.
> Most of them own youtube channels as well, which requires additional time to process, edit, and mix videos, depending on what they're doing with it.
Which is most of the time not done by them. Usually they pay people for this. And to be fair, Videos of streamers are usually not really masterpieces either. They are optimized versions of their streaming-content. A good youtube-creator has significant more skill there. They occasionally also create far higher quality of content than most streamers.
> It's an incredibly demanding gig, that, at the very least, requires a pretty insane schedule, or being really passionate about the job.
How many streamers do you actually know? Well scheduled is not really what I would call most streams I've seen.
> Maybe some streamers get help in production and orchestrating their stream, but for most it's more than a full-time job commitment.
If you are a fulltime-streamer, earning money, then they pretty much all get help to some degree.
> Those average Joes you mentioned? They get 1-2 viewers, who are usually their closest friends.
Not really. They are many dedicated hardworking people with similar skill-levels even on the lowest levels. Success in streaming depends far more on luck than skill. Though, luck is also a skill in some way, so hard to say...
But the skills I was talking about are not the ones you are getting naturally but being alive or just doing stuff long enough to acquire them. Obviously if you stream long enough you get a bunch of skills and knowledge automatically, which any non-streamer is missing yet. But that is nothing special.
Special is stuff not everyone has or can acquire on it's own. Like a professional who went through a long professional training, reaching a level of quality a normal selfmade-streamer never can reach. Or someone which a career outside of streaming. There are more and more people like that hitting the platforms. Many entertainers with decade-long careers came in the pandemia to twitch and youtube, searching for new playgrounds and displaying skills which leaves any big established streamer in the dust.