To be fair, Handmade Hero also seems like a project designed to co-opt unearned feel-goods. Maybe one of the goals was to teach, but another goal was to actually ship a game, and he took pre-orders for it before eventually abandoning development. It turns out it's a lot easier to talk about making good programs than it is to actually make them. I do think it is possible to make high-quality handmade software, but being performative about doing so rather than just doing the thing is probably counterwise to ever actually just doing the thing.

I for one feel like my 15$ spent on Handmade Hero were well served by having access to the source code and the breadth of video that annotates every line of code. I think anyone that looked at he proposition that Casey made as something more than a way to support him, was naive.