Live streaming just seems to have so many downsides to me:
1. Requires real-time presence
2. No editing (meaning less efficient use of time for the viewer)
3. No client-side speeding up/skipping irrelevant parts
4. No possibility of index or table of contents
What are some use cases where live streaming is better?
There is also the "event" nature of streaming, where the audience is excited to react to things together in real-time, like when people Tweet when watching the Superbowl or a show's season finale. Even for mundane streams, the "chat" will happily talk amongst themselves reacting to whatever the streamer is doing, which can feel like hanging out with friends.
There's also times where the streamer is discussing something that is happening now or just happening (world events, the Superbowl, a game update, etc), where viewers are excited about the content right now and don't want to wait for the traditional record->edit->release cycle.
There is a special skill of streamers who can play an action game on one half of the screen and read enough of chat on the other half to make and respond to jokes, at the same time.
Another consideration: youtube and twitch apply different music licensing considerations to live, so almost anything that involves music MUST be live and unarchived.
Streaming is also much more low-cost to produce, editing can often represent an unwanted source of complexity and loss of creative control.
Live streaming is inherently mor einteractive and there's a shared experience simply because you can't speed up.
I guess you could see that live-streaming is experience-based. VODs are results-based. Not strictly the case but there's a trend.
No one EVER interacts.
My 15-second YouTube Shorts of my cat get around 400 views, sometimes as many as 10,000!
Go figure.