And sometimes his advice is good, sometimes it isn't but as a newbie you don't know which part you can trust and which one is one of his peculiarities. Therefore I would avoid following his opinions. His list of camera/lens specs is admittedly pretty good.
And the other issue is that his photos are so comically bad that I kinda have problems taking whatever he says seriously.
I've personally noticed a large difference in the mechanical performance (not necessarily the image performance) of my L v. non-L lenses and thus prefer Ls. I have non-Ls but they get used a lot less because they're heavier, louder, and much slower to focus. This doesn't seem to bother Rockwell which is more than fine; he's probably a) much less spoiled than me and b) working in different environments where these issues are less serious.
Newbies never know who or what to trust. That's part of what makes you a newbie. You just have to come in and start trying things out and figuring out what does or doesn't work in your particular use case, and not stick religiously to random guy's blog if you find those techniques are not working for you.
You can't even pretend that's true. Pretty much every new Nikon camera body review he puts out is a long list of 'this is exactly the same', interspersed with 'these useless numbers are bigger'.
The only recommendations I think he's given in the past 5 or so years is the D600, D7X00 for crop, and the D750 when that came out. Hell, in the reviews for later versions of a camera, he usually recommends to get an older model used. And for newbies, it's always the base model.
His monetization strategy is straightforward and transparent.
FWIW, I agree it's not a great place to point newbies, but the cynical/shill angle is too far.
There's also a common impulse in all niches to hate on whoever is popular and attracting a lot of newbies. Rockwell certainly does that.
While there are certainly things that even relatively-inexperienced photographers can find to disagree with Rockwell about, there is no doubt that his web site is useful and informative, especially as introductory material.