Bedrockgames
I post in the voice of Christopher Walken
The problem becomes though, if you're not willing to run a game yourself, you wind up playing in garbage games because it's the only game in town. So many terrible DM's keep their players because the players don't want to be the one to rock the boat. It's shocking what people will tolerate.
But, yeah, I'm going to totally agree that it's almost always a DM Ego issue. Give anyone that much authority in a social situation, including (at most tables anyway) the authority to eject any player at any time, combined with the typical age of a gamer, and it's not really a shock that there are toxic DM's out there.
There is more to this equation than just bad GMs. Being on both sides of the screen what I have observed is, yes bad GMs do exist. They are not nearly as common as people seem to suggest on some forums, but they certainly exist (though again, in my experience you tend to bump into them more at public venues rather than private tables). But bad players are also a thing. And one type of bad player is someone who wrecks the fun for everyone at the table because they walk around with an overly perfect image in their head of the 'ideal campaign', the 'ideal GM' or 'ideal group'. Obviously there are critiques from the player side that are well founded. But most game groups are made up of 5-6 people at least, and only one of them is the GM. The GM has certain powers in terms of mechanics, but that doesn't give the GM complete control over peoples thoughts or behavior. And I think just as often, a bad game can be pinned on the player side as the GM side.
All that said, the number of bad players and GMs, or the amount of bad table behavior, I have seen in real life (at least post-Highschool) is very low.