The audience is not passive in this system
People often condemn influencer chaos while still feeding it. That contradiction is one of the reasons the cycle lasts.
Viewers click, repost, mock, speculate, and refresh. They call a situation disgusting, then help keep it trending. In distribution terms, outrage and admiration are not very different. They are both engagement.
That is why public scandal online so often turns into moral theater. People gather to criticize the performance, but their criticism still extends the life of the performance. A breakdown becomes not only a personal collapse, but also a piece of public entertainment sustained by audience reaction.
Accountability can be real, but a lot of what gets called accountability is still participation in the same attention economy that helped create the mess.
The aftermath is usually emptier than the spike suggests. Attention after implosion is not the same thing as trust. Brands pull away, the audience grows suspicious, and the creator is left with visibility that no longer means much.