I explained that there is indeed real reason. The majority of Twitch streamers use a bot that connects to TMI or IRC. The majority of Twitch streamers additionally poll the API for followers
It could reduce traffic on the API, and eliminate it entirely for some streamers, particularly if they only need follower notifications from the API and nothing else.
The system works as it is, correct, but that doesn’t mean there isn’t room for improvement.
I also don’t think it would require much work to trigger a follower event. I’m not Twitch staff, so take that with a grain of salt, but TMI already seems to trigger events for subscribers and a lot of other things. Intuition would suggest that it wouldn’t be much work to incorporate followers to that list.
DallasNChains makes a good point that there isn’t a follower message in chat. However, I feel the introduction of follower events to TMI and the proper proliferation of using it as the primary way of receiving follower updates would reduce traffic on the API and enable quicker follower alerts to boot.