Blame Youtube. They are the ones that run a purposely zero sum and adversarial system for directing attention at your videos. If he doesn't have a high enough click rate on his videos, Youtube will literally stop showing them to people, even subscribers.
Youtube demonstrably wants clickbait titles and thumbnails. They built tooling to automatically A/B test titles and thumbnails for you.
Youtube could fix this and stop it if they want, but that might lose them 1% of business so they never will.
They love that you blame creators for this market dynamic instead of the people who literally create the market dynamic.
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.
FWIW I like Level 2 Jeff more and I would watch the videos with or without the clickbait-y titles. As you've said I've never found your titles deceptive so if they bring you more money, then more power to you
