For what it’s worth, as long as the stream is active you yourself don’t have to be actively watching it. You could find a streamer who’s streaming overnight (relative to your timezone), put Twitch on, go to bed and wake up with a mount.

And to be fair, any sort of external requirement is going to annoy someone, and FFXIV does have a few of them. Between regionalised promotions, food tie-ins, streaming rewards, timed preorder bonuses, time restricted PvP rewards, expensive statues locking emotes, etc.

There’s always going to be some stuff people would like but either can’t get or don’t want to participate in whatever the promotion is. I don’t see that going away any time soon.