Yeah I remember early youtube for example. Early youtube was more of a "doing it because you want to make something fun and put it out there" to an extent. But some of it, especially as it grew, was "appearing to be doing it because you want to make something fun and put it out there but there's actually a company like Maker Studios behind you that you don't call attention to and you act like it's all you anyway (probably because that sells better)". Then there was shit like all the "prank" channels that would put on this show like they were pranking people in real life and eventually it came out that most of them were staged. Slowly, youtube morphed into being more openly a place where people were trying to make money off of it, but it was already being that with a mask on for a long time prior. When Patreon came along, it more enabled people to turn the stuff into an actually independent "small business", as opposed to being on contract with a corporation, formalizing the idea of the platform as one to make money off of while trying to retain some semblance of the quirky individual image.

But it was never very authentic. Maybe more so in the very early days before monetization was well-established, but as soon as people could be a youtube partner and make money off of videos, that was the beginning of the end of "quirky authenticity", instead morphing it into something more like reality TV that is presented as actually real to a (largely in those days) audience of kids who are not wise enough to tell the difference.