To be fair, the idea of a centralized computer generating content for dumb terminals to display has been around since the dawn of computing. Terminals connected to mainframes. Local X servers drew content as requested by remote X clients. The idea of having all your software and data on a very powerful computer inside your home (or pocket) is the crazy new one.
Certainly the concerns and dynamics of the situation are different now than in the 70s and 80s, but some of the thought processes are the same. People want to stream video games because they don't have $2000 up front to lay out on a gaming PC. Streaming lets them pay $5 a month instead, and unlike credit, there is no commitment. That's valuable. Greed is another reason for the cloud. There is no reason why someone should pay $10 per month for Photoshop, but since it's the only option, people do. That's free money for Adobe's shareholders.
I can see why people try to poo-pooh this stuff; computing is built on hobbyist experimentation, and the cloud takes all that away. You can't write your own video game. You can't tweak settings, or make mods. You just get a game that someone else made. But from a technical standpoint, streaming stuff is probably going to work. I have less than 1ms ping to a nearby datacenter (speed of light distance: 8 microseconds), and so do 10 million of my neighbors, so it's probably quite profitable to have a collection of high-density GPUs and CPUs rendering games for a few peak hours a day and then training machine learning models outside those hours. The technical challenges are minimal; the idea has been around for 50 years. The actual challenge is getting the people who own the cables in the ground between your house and that datacenter to actually switch packets quickly enough to make it all work. When you were connecting a mainframe in the basement to terminals upstairs, you made it work because it was your job. But now, one company owns all the cables and another wants to make content to send over those cables, and the incentives no longer align. Sure, Spectrum COULD update their core routers... but they could also not do that, and then your video game streaming service is dead. (Meanwhile, they dream of showing up and making their own video game streaming service. They have as much time as they want, because they own the cables!)