I am a bit old, and never got why so many people watch “actual play”. I’ve done it once or twice to get the mechanic of a game, but found the experience more technical/boring than fun.
I get having a guest or candidate player watching an in person to see how rpg work, or whether they click with the group, but somehow watching video of strangers playing RPG doesn’t sounds fun to me. But I might miss something considering how popular these actual plays are
I’m young and although I understand intellectually what people get out of it, I share your sentiment. I can find people telling stories of their fun campaign online, in text, which is faster for me to consume than listening to people talk. These stories do usually just tell the story and scrub out the “because X happened, we take out Y game mechanic and this is how it works”, so I suppose it makes sense to watch a playthrough to get mechanic exposure.
But I just really… don’t have the patience for audio and video when I can usually get what I want by reading a lot faster. I also do not need to make special accommodations to make others happy to read. No dragging headphones with me to avoid bothering the general public, and I keep more awareness of my surroundings when I can hear what is going on.
I share the philosophy of “why watch others do Fun Thing You Enjoy when you could just do Fun Thing You Enjoy yourself?”
I figure I’ll just leave all these videos up for everyone to enjoy. As long as I do not view myself as some superior human being for the very, very elite trait of simply not sharing this interest, it’s perfectly okay for me to not enjoy watching others play TTRPG. People are allowed to find things boring.