Checking if stream is active reliability

Nope thats it, that said you should only be polling API end points once per minute any quicker it’s not worth it, as Twitch caches data it’s side, so what you are seeing is the different cached responses between servers behind the Twitch API load balancer.

In the case of a partnered streamer you could use the x people resubbed whilst you were away as a start stream marker.