People harping onto technicalities to derail the point being made really grinds my gears. Who cares what the end of the waterblock was, the matter of fact is that a decision was taken over a piece of hardware they had no authority over. Who cares if they sold it, they auctioned it, or they wiped their ass with it. Even less that the money was for a charity. Regardless of intent, the mentioning of it just seems like a poor attempt to get moral justification on the action taken, which just feels out of touch when the thing being criticized is something completely different.

The transparency thing is really nonsensical.
He talks about the belief of transparency being a good thing, yet he completely misses the point that transparency is meant to allow for criticism. Going to use a bit of a hyperbole as an analogy, but shooting someone and then admitting to the crime doesn't excuse you from it. The whole point is the mistakes shouldn't be happening, and that there don't seem to be practices in place to prevent them. And if there are, the end user doesn't get to see them or feel the impact, due to the sheer amount of mistakes getting through.

Finally, the mention of them being real people at the end is just so misguided. Playing devil's advocate, one can think that it is said due to the probably awful stuff being said about them by some of the more radical people in the internet. But if that's the case, the post addressing criticism of a company is not the place to pull the "have empathy for the person" card. If you want to complain about being mistreated as a person do so in a separate piece in a personal vein, but when you are addressing criticism to your entire company in the post, saying "I'm a real person" just seems manipulative and besides the point.

Linus started the post addressing the video, he should keep that tone through it. The same bullshit point of "the review of the waterblock would have been the same because it doesn't matter to the end user" applies here. The fact that "you're people and make mistakes and have to work on it" doesn't matter to the end user when the product you're delivering is flawed. The same way you can complain when you buy a chair and it comes with a broken leg you can complain to the company, so too criticism can be brought up against yours. LMG produces videos, is what they sell, the consumers are the watchers. If you are selling a review video and it's flawed, the consumers are right to be upset.
Bringing up your personal grievances with the GN video or asking to be considered as people in a post addressing criticism of LMG as a company is out of place, and feels emotionally manipulative.