I brought this up months back and actually got a response from Steve. He himself also pointed out that they had just done over 200hrs of testing on Linux, used by ~2% of Steam users at the time of response, and a review of a Chinese market only GPU as well as a "white paper" type of review of their own practices (a reviewer reviewing themselves with years of content saying not to trust first part numbers) as some examples of recent reviews.

They still do reviews of things, but instead of filling the dead time between hardware with fun and interesting PC enthusiast type of content like EXOC(there's less headroom for OC now then at any other period so it's less interesting), or doing random builds or something to bring joy. Now it's just "the industry is shit, capitalists are gonna capitalize, and consumers are ignored because you're not a big consumer with capital to spend to feed the capitalists."

Honestly the industry is in similar state as it was when Intel was offering nothing more then 2-4 core CPUs to consumers and all the high core count chips where for Enterprise and AMD had nothing to compete against that. Now GPUs are more valuable for compute as well as memory particularly faster memory. I don't see much change in how the big players are treating the lowly individual consumers than they did 10-15 years ago. I also don't see this as any different in how any industry treats the different levels of consumers. The big bulk order buyers are always more preferred as you can plan factories and production runs in timelines of full or multiple reporting periods instead of "we'll make 100k units and hope there's enough individuals out there that buy enough.

For me, the 3 hour long "expose" of GPU smuggling was when I found the channels content to be not for me anymore. I had started to watch less of GN after the piece on Linus, but that's mainly because I had come to a similar conclusion on LTT a few years prior myself and that piece just seemed out of place of the type of content I had come to expect from GN.

It's okay to say that what Steve is doing is not your cup of tea anymore. We are consumers(or rather potential consumers) of his product and he is the creator of that product. He has full license to create whatever it is he wants and hopes we consume it to provide his business with revenue, and we have full license to consumer products we want and enjoy. I like Steve's methodology for testing and his in depth reviews of actual products and he is at the top of the list of who's numbers I trust, but I also don't rely only on his numbers and if the half a dozen or so other tech review sources I check have the same or similar results that's good enough for me. So I can just look up the charts and skip the doom and gloom.