I think the bigger issue is that it exposes him as not very popular and that breaks his illusion of being a "back channel influencer". His
YouTube channel currently has 869 subscribers. The highest video is the one
name-dropping Cenk Uygur with 4.9k views in the past seven months. Of course, you can argue that if you want to grow your channel, you just have to put in the hard work and they'll hopefully come, but it's hard to pretend he's some major big shot with less than 900 accounts willing to subscribe to him.
I think at least part of it is him getting a sore ego over not having a runaway success with his YouTube channel since he thinks everyone is fascinated over what he has to say. Same thing that made him drop his "career" as a game developer - he doesn't like working hard to actually become successful, he just thinks he can decide to do something and it'll just happen.