Is that normal? To promote a research paper in ArXiv so heavily? I think the parent comment’s concerns still apply, saying a large, well-funded YouTube channel is specifically releasing coordinated content to promote this prompts more questions than it answers, in my mind.

Yes it is common, just not always to the scale of a Veritasium video. Usually it’s just the press office for a university putting out a press release or a summary article in Scientific American.

But in the case where the story is interesting to a larger audience, having a push behind a story across non-academic media is not unheard of. If you can get some media coverage of an academic topic, it can be very beneficial to the researchers’ careers. One goal for a researcher is to bring notoriety to their research, to their institution, and to the field in general. This is the main motivation I see.

The authors may have pushed the arxiv paper out earlier due to the timing of the release of the video.