There is an ex-FFXI player who is now a low tier youtuber, he's making pretty decent money despite having only 10k subs and having mostly garbage content (he buys the latest hyped game, makes a let's play video per day, rinse repeat).
Then again, what I consider "pretty decent money" may be pocket change for some people or a fortune for others.
People really underestimate the money thrown at this part of the industry.
why the hell are these games so popular?
Because they're the trend. No more, no less.
What makes them the trend? The fact that people play them.
All these companies have to do is to attract people and have them play their game, even once, or even create an account and never play, that's perfect, too.
They can then inflate and make up numbers on the fly (just like FFXIV does with its subscribers for example), which will in turn make more people follow the trend and so on.
I'm not the target demographic so they have literally 0 power on me but this whole "amateur online influencer" era we are going through makes sense to me.
When I was their age I was influenced by Rodney Mullen, Ninja is their Rodney Mullen, as simple as that. Ninja plays Fortnite? Let's try it! The same way we got a board back then to try stuff.
What surprises me personally is that those influencers, those people followed by so many, they're literally not even good at what they play. I mean, they won tournaments (where 12 years olds were rampant and nobody else spent as much time trying to be good at), they were pro at some point (if Shroud is who I think it is), but they aren't even worth remembering on whichever game they peaked on.