That's reasonable, Melody definitely made the costhots aware that they didn't even need to show their body/save their face to milk lonely men wallets. If you add the quick uprising of VRC with barely any rules, it was a market open to be exploited.I would argue that it was Melody who opened the floodgates for all that degenerate shit. Since she's the first one who was doing it with a virtual avatar even before Vtubing got popular. I still remember the posts from regular camwhores seething about her from like 2016.
But even then we didn't have this blatant marketing of today, with Fansly taking a main sponsor and advertising during Filian's Vtuber Awards, that was at least 90k live viewership watching some whores debuting and publicizing their pages there.