Ok. This is everything we found. I deliberately am not mentioning anything brought up already that was dug up last night. This is specifically what we found in relation to Samantha D. Howard and her career as a Youtuber.
In the beginning, she started out as BrownBeeTV

Now there was other stuff before this, links provided below:
In general this was her start point. As far as we can tell, not too much happened with this one, though it lead to bigger and "better" things. Meet Senzawa.

This is her and arguably where she got popular. I will let
@notorietus explain, as he put it pretty good:
"Searching further, you probably may recognize Senzawa, but not from 1st glance. She was very popular in 2016-2018, and had various videos. You might recognize "oki doki boomer" (which you might have recognized from a video from someone who licked a ice cream tub at a public Walmart). Or this 2nd video where she sings "rawr xD nuzzels you uwu your so warm". These videos actually primarily come up from this channel 1st:


Now, from here, she gets a contract from Hololive EN
as Gawr Gura, which after multiple arguments about how stuff was managed, she retires, and then transitions into "
saba the fish" (Sameko Saba)."
Thank you. As you can see, she got pretty popular back then, did some meme videos, all that. Then she got with Hololive and became Gura. That is where this story becomes frankly crazy. We need to go back to 2020 to plot the rise. Everyone is stuck inside. Suddenly Vtubers are a thing in the west. Gura among others become immensely fucking popular overnight. And eventually you start seeing stuff like this:
By all accounts i've heard, she was more or less the mascot of Hololive, the biggest Vtuber corpo in the west. She mostly stayed out of controversy. The corpos made sure her image stayed sparkling.
This, in my humble opinion, is why she left. She was rich. They made her a superstar. This wasn't enough though. She had realized her audience at that point. Pedophile Lolicons. So she created Saba. One of the best, if not THE best rigged model in Vtubing from a technical perspective. And she was going to use it to farm her audience for their pedo NEET bux. And it worked. When she returned as Saba, the memberships she was getting were endless. She also had merch ready to fucking go:

All of this was pre planned for months presumably. And it went off without a hitch. She now has over a million subs on her new channel. She is raking in the cash without Hololive taking a cut. And all she gave up was any shred of dignity she had left.