Earlier quoted context omitted.
Yes you are right, some people do watch chess engines play. TCEC (Top Chess Engine Championship) [1] streams them. Popular chess YouTubers goes over engine games from time to time too. [1] https://tcec-chess.com/
That's not proof of interest so much as proof of commerce. It could easily be a money-laundering mechanism. Mostly nobody cares about professional chess. The number of people who are actually interested in today's game and not the drama are a tiny sliver of that. This is actually great because it means we can train and evaluate both without interference from chess players, possibly even building a stable society.
Here [1] is a video made 3 months ago going over an engine vs an engine made by of one of the big YouTubers, which has 1.4m views. Enough proof?