Yeah, I can sort of understand the impulse that everything must be preserved no matter what because we don’t know what will be useful or interesting, but it’s not realistic. Embrace ephemerality! It’s fine!
Even if you are in favor of preserving “everything”, streamers produce a lot of crap that really is completely useless like a 30 minute start of the archived video that is just an image with a timer ticking down or just a static image.
Those aren’t typically included in highlights.
I think what a lot of people are missing here is that this isn’t just raw VODs, those already do expire automatically. But the highlight function was explicitly supposed to be for long-term archival, Twitch told users to highlight anything they want saved, and now that rug is getting pulled out from under them.
Want to bet it is largely a few idiots who took that to mean “highlight everything” who ruined that for everyone?