Generallty the information is instantly out of date, or not practical to provide to consumers of the API (caching etc)
This would of been my recommendation, since well, that is me!
Perhaps only load the first page or two of streams rather than going deeper.
It may also suggest that Twitch doesn’t want to support this sort of statistical gathering, hence the no view counts on the category based endpoints. And the apparent “difficultly” in what you are trying to do.
This is against the Developer TOS
Developers should only use the endpoints documented in the documentation
Anything else can change, break, or even stop existing at any time. Since Twitch won’t advance warning us for changes to things developers are not expected to be using.
You can make feature requests on the uservoice, don’t forget to cite your usecase/reasoning!
https://twitch.uservoice.com/forums/310213-developers
Sounds somewhat sensible. Since you’ll also only need to do game fetches for gameID’s you don’t have cached.
After 10/20 pages or so you start to get weirdness anyway. As channels will jump about on pages and be returned multiple times.
IE You load page 15, a big streamer comes online and appears instanly on page 1, which pushes streamer bob from the last entry on page 15 to the first entry on page 16 for example.
The tail end of streams will have various fun things like that, so you’d need to deduplicate.