Joe asks: Are stream pipelines the same as ‘RxJava’
Not quite. Although Java 8 Streams and RxJava (“Reactive Extensions in Java”) are both examples of “stream programming” or “functional reactive programming”, whereby functional programming meets the processing of data stream, RxJava is a set of 3rd-party libraries that provide an API with additional facilities over Java 8 Streams (but I would read to the respective manual to get a good idea on what these are).
More text at Baeldung for example: