>>42471869
Before Nijisanji chuubas were all 3D with motion capture. They posted 5-10 minutes videos 2-3 times a week. There was some effort behind, and content was varied since they were a new thing and shit was experimental at first. Most of them were corporate products but some had a lot of SOVL since they were garage companies. Then you had absolute soulless corporate jokes like Yua trying to jump into the fad to make bank.
People using Live2D, anime girl static pics, or whatever that wasn't their real faces to make youtube/niconico videos or streaming vidya also existed, but no one considered chuubas, they were their own separate thing.
After Nijisanji started operations that line separating chuubas from live2D completely vanished. Chuuba scene became all about low effort vidya streaming with anime girl avatar, basically twitch for weebs. Nijisanji dumping a new batch of """"talents"""" every month didn't help. Then Hololive expanded their operations with a slighty more curated lineup of anime girls and took over the market.