That's deliberately misinterpreting. The overwhelming criticism of this view count regression kerfuffle was centered around creators and the lost revenue: YouTube was pervasively accused of cooking numbers to stiff their creators.

No one anywhere was arguing from the perspective of a viewer. Until it turned out that the regression was due to an adblocker change. Now suddenly creators don't matter and it's really the viewer's visibility into view counts that is the important element.

And that seems... insincere.