This is absolutely the wrong thread for this discussion, but I'll throw you a bone because I have some thoughts on the situation as well.
I too used to be a big Cryaotic fan in the early 2010s, but stopped watching him probably around 2014 for unrelated reasons (I started finding his voice annoying
). I'd heard a lot about his then-girlfriend, but definitely did NOT know that she was only 16 when they started dating, so it's very jarring to have those memories of their "cute" interactions retroactively desecrated. I also enjoyed Cry because of his lowkey style and very muted humor; it was much less exhausting than listening to Markiplier scream for 10 minutes straight.
But unfortunately - and this DOES tie back to Vinesauce - this is exactly what happens when you become attached to someone you don't actually know. The act they put on in streams and videos is just that. Sure, one could argue that some streamers or Youtubers are probably not much different behind the scenes, but there is ALWAYS some degree of falsehood or a veneer being put over their real selves, and the very quiet and shy Cryaotic turning out to be a creepy predator is a perfect example of that. I don't think he plans on ending his career, but I certainly will never watch one of his videos again, and if he takes a big ProJared-style hit to his follower count and public reputation, that will be only a fraction of what he deserves.
No he didn't.
He was outed on Twitter days before he released his video. The video was damage control, and he doesn't even take the blame for his actions in it - he pins it all on "his past self," saying that he "genuinely hates his past self" for doing this, as if he wasn't still engaging with teenage girls up until someone finally spilled the beans. As you yourself pointed out, there's no way he didn't know about the girls he was talking to - don't let him trick you into absolving him based on some dumb technicality. That's how these youtuber apologies always go.
That said, getting back to Vinesauce, I do believe that people who do dumb and fucked up stuff like this deserve to be raked over the coals for it. If Vinny or even Joel did end up doing some shit similar to this and got outed, I would drop them in a heartbeat. They're funny guys, and I'll always appreciate Vinesauce as a unit for being so consistently good throughout the years, but I wouldn't even bother trying to defend them if there were substantiated claims that they had committed some serious wrongdoing along those lines. As we've discussed before, parasocial relationships between streamer and fan basically create hundreds of free PR agents who will do their damndest to defend some random guy on the internet, and I'd rather not be one of those people who can't think objectively and actually analyze the information before drawing a conclusion.
