the problem to build a competitor is the community, not the technical part. If one (or a handful of) streamer move elsewhere, most of the viewers won't follow him
I don't use Twitch deeply so I'm not sure if this is a big enough thing to make people switch in large numbers, but if it is, the tech stack just doesn't seem like a moat at all these days. If anything, I'd say the fact that they prune old content already sort of is the opposite. YouTube's deep content library makes it hard to compete with them. Twitch purposefully doesn't even have one.
A skilled programmer could probably bang out a viable competitor in a week, and raise funds just as fast if the AWS bill became significant.
And the culture. Your examples are from the 2000s. The culture of the Internet back then was vastly different than it is today.
> A skilled programmer could probably bang out a viable competitor in a week, and raise funds just as fast if the AWS bill became significant.
I disagree. Where is this magic funds button? You're gonna need quite the pitch to get an investor to invest LOTS of money going up against Amazon (edit: and Google!).
You very rarely hear of the startup who ran out of money because they had too much traffic.
Running a massive video site is not as simple as throwing a bunch of skilled programmers at it...