People are so concerned with identities and I almost don't understand it.
It's due to a fusion between the IRL identity and the internet persona. The character becomes the person, in a way.
Take me, for example. I'm
@Toji Suzuhara, NGE fan, A&N poster, avid user, not very kind to alphabets and prone to long-winded rants. But those are all things that I can do under any name and on (theoretically) any platform, I can go to Reddit tomorrow, open the account KamchatskyNavalOfficer2001, abandon this account to never come back, and do those very same things.
@Meowthkip can't do that, or rather, Sarah (in regards to Cat Bountry) can't do that.
Cat Bountry is an OC, to be specific, a cope OC. It is an OC used to explain and communicate things that are personal to
Sarah, it is a corgi because Sarah likes corgies, it does the things it does because those are things that Sarah would do, it violently killed the stand-in for Israel Peskowitz because that's what Sarah wishes she were able to do in that moment. It is, at its essence, not a part or the aspiration or the idealized desires of a person represented throught a creative medium, but rather that very person existing within a fictional context. If the first examples were like how some writers use a pseudonym when publishing (like Joanne Rowling with her J. K. Rowling pen name), the second one would be akin to a name change, like with Cassius Clay and Muhammad Ali.
Cat Bountry and Sarah Stotler are, effectively, one and the same, and for the first to be abandoned the second would need to change enough for that name to no longer be an alias, but its own character. As it stands now, to delete the Cat Bountry account would be, in Sarah's perspective, to abandon a large part of who she is, something which is exacerbated by the fact that there isn't actuslly all that much which Sarah does that isn't connected to Cat Bountry itself. Most of her friends are online, most of her communication is online, the entirety of her job is done online, she doesn't have a family (at least one that's close enough to prevent her from being statutorie'd at 15), a boyfriend, children, career, etc, that isn't connected to the internet and thus isn't done using the character of Cat Bountry