They may as well stop pretending and fully allow adult content, because it's pretty obvious that these streamers will keep pushing the limits until they get permabanned or twitch gives in to the "women streamers did nothing wrong" crowd.
This is all ignoring what Twitch would be giving up by embracing this. What’d be the impact of the negative optics when it comes to parents? Do they stop letting their kids on Twitch? How important is that to their bottom line? What about the consoles / platforms that have a Twitch integration? Is that now seen as an endorsement of or gateway to adult content that the platform owners didn’t sign up for?
Even if Twitch were actually able to pull that off, there’s a whole lot on the line, and certainly market segments that they know that they’d be saying goodbye to.
Or it would be nice if they could, anyway. In reality with the age verification laws popping up in more places, they probably want to stay far away from the impending bureaucratic and legal nightmare.
One could argue they are already there, putting an unblur button on streams is basically the same as an "I'm over 18" button on adult sites. No verification, no auditing, the button does nothing but make it look like they care.
I would further guess that this would only be one aspect of the broader marginalization of the Red version of the service—they wouldn't be promoting it openly on the main Twitch, because that would antagonize the "think-of-the-children" types, and it would no longer benefit from cross-recommendations and from people watching a Call of Duty stream until 11PM, and then noticing in the sidebar that their favorite adult streamer has come online and switching over to them. They would probably even suffer from the one quasi-legitimate excuse the payment processors have for banning adult sites: much higher rates of chargebacks, as people with overly judgmental and insufficiently communicative significant others try to hide them on their credit card statements (or any of a bunch of other reasons).
It would be great if we could collectively treat sex work as work, just like any other form of selling our bodies and minds to support ourselves—and, indeed, for the time being that is effectively what Twitch is doing, and in doing so benefits both themselves and these streamers, who otherwise would have to use more stigmatized platforms with much less reach.
We can't funding for ad free search, video stream or software development, but we have millions of men and women doing OnlyFans... I don't get it.
I'm willing to bet that 60% of OF creators, after accounting for the required equipment, are not making money. I'd also bet that at least 20% of those making money are from a country where $150 a month is a whole salary.
And then there's the question of how many of them are being trafficked.
People are hypocritical. There are a lot of religion fanatics, prude morality fighters and others activists fighting against "sins". But in the end of day they all come home and watch porn. And many pay for it directly or indirectly.
And markets with most prude societies are usually ones with highest porn consumption. Humanity.