I mean, I do get the pretentiousness, bit it feels like its more played for laughs as a character and not real? at least to me?
I think it suddenly started to feel like less of an act around that time. I am having a hard time explaining it but he just seemed kind of full of himself. Like he was making himself out to be bigger than he was between the constant rebooting of his channel, less jokes and more opinionated content, and trying to branch out into everything at once.
Just not for me but I feel like those kind of changes happen a lot anyway when content creators grow to a substantial level of popularity.