Chess streaming had gained critical mass before that, and as the sibling comment points out, there were a lot of conversations happening in relation to how chess was clearly gaining momentum, particularly on twitch, before the first actual pogchamps. I was more using Pogchamps as a placeholder term for referring to the overall boom of chess on twitch. That is definitely why Netflix funded it. I've been told this somewhat directly but can't elaborate further than that.

From these charts that that just isn't very convincing anymore:

https://socialblade.com/twitch/user/gmhikaru/monthly https://socialblade.com/twitch/user/chessbrah/monthly

And I say that as someone who was watching Hiarku on twitch in 2018 and even wrote long post on this site about why Chess is the fastest growing esport" in 2019. [ I seem to have lost which account I posted that under however, I maintain separate work accounts and suspect I posted that one one company time (oops!) ]

But looking back, I was over-optimistic, not about Chess' prospects as an esport, but about how much it had really grown given what happened when we saw a real boom from the pandemic, from xQc and pogchamps, and from the Queen's Gambit.

Pohchamps was in the making since 2018.

Do you have a source for that? Googling literally returns your own post here as the top result.