[dzaima]

Speedrunning is very much modded - ranked (the big content) is just flat out modded (not just the match setup, there are game tweaks too (guaranteed blaze drops after 20 or so iirc, guaranteed dragon perch in ≤3 mins)), and even RSG/SSG/AA/etc have a long list of allowed mods (much quicker seed rerolling, timer, perf improvement mods, etc). Many(/most/all? idk) Many (/most/all? idk) hermits use mods (esp. freecam, replaymod for creating timelapses / pretty camera perspectives). Never mind shaders sprinkled in a portion of everything.

[permo-w]

These are minor tweaks. You could remove these and the speedrunning community/HC would lose little. A second account in spectator mode is a slightly less convenient version of freecam and the speedrunning community is kidding themselves in the first place allowing any tweaks to RNG whatsoever. They could ban that tomorrow and there'd be some grumbling but nothing would change viewership-wise

[dmonitor]

Minor tweaks are still a mod. Gameplay overhaul modpacks that turn the game into Factorio are definitely the a small minority of the playerbase, but anyone who knows better plays with at least some sort of client-side performance mod (Optifine, Lithium, etc), and that's been true since before 1.0.

Etho's dedication to keeping a purely vanilla singleplayer world is a unique feat. If you want to use Hermitcraft as an example of the median SMP, their modlist is actually quite large: https://github.com/henkelmax/hermitcraft-server

Minecraft simply has a lot of areas for improvement that haven't been touched by Mojang for one reason or another, and a big reason why people stick with Java is because the community has built an ecosystem to tweak the game to their liking.

[dzaima]

The main actual speedrunning categories don't allow any RNG changes; but I doubt anyone doing RSG would have any interest whatsoever going back to the 20x-or-whatever slower seed rolling, that's just a completely utterly dumb waste of time doing literally nothing except clicking a button every 5 seconds (effectively changing the category from "who can play the game the best" to much more like "who has the most beast of a machine to run as many minecraft instances in parallel to more quickly roll a good seed"). Viewership would definitely go down from there being less actual gameplay.

Ranked is intended to be a fun competitive thing; waiting 10 minutes for a dragon perch doing nothing is Not Fun; waiting forever at a spawner is Not Fun; simple as that, people wouldn't play it if it wasn't fun. (oh, also, I believe Ranked also just generally includes making mob drops consistent for the same seed (and consistent portal locations, and probably other things), without which the whole entire concept of competitively playing the same seed would not work whatsoever, devolving to just who got the better RNG, distinctly Not Fun; also the ability to review a replay of your game afterwards for learning). Viewership and player counts would go down because you'd just be looking at very slow gambling instead of something actually meaningfully-skill-based.

A second account might work for freecam (though it adds more editing work, aka makes you not want to actually use it much), but making pretty timelapses is not feasible that way. Granted, you could still live without it, but the quality of content would undoubtedly go down. The little things go a long, long, long way.