If it makes an appreciable difference to how much money he makes on YouTube then I can’t begrudge him for doing it.

Don’t hate the player, hate the game.

Just to add context — I've been experimenting on my 2nd channel (Level 2 Jeff) with titles that are straight/barebones exactly describing the content of the video, vs a slight bit of clickbait (never untrue, but certainly more intriguing and not describing the exact topic of the video).

The ones that are dead straight with no clickbait are 10/10 (the worst performers), and usually by a massive margin. Even with the same thumbnail.

The sad fact is, if you want your work seen on YouTube, you can't just say "I built a 10 node Raspberry Pi blade cluster and ran HPL and LLMs on it".

Some people are fine with a limited audience. And that's fine too! I don't have to write on my blog at all—I earn negative income from that, since I pay for hosting and a domain, but I hope some people enjoy the content in text form like I do.