I always find funny how first world citizens don't want the Amazon being (ab)used, or dislike the palm oil industry, but still want to keep and develop their own agricultural lands AND their living standards.
Personally I want to reduce road traffic in favor of electric public transit, heavily reduce meat consumption, ban fast fashion and all but eliminate single use plastics, completely stop fossil fuel extraction and use.
And I think the way forward is for the globally privileged elite (that's primarily us in Europe and the US) to lead by example and use the greater resources available to us to make a difference first, improve our spotty record instead of leaning back and just dictating to others what we think they should do. Historically, we've already done that more than plenty already.
I know that at some level their merch and maybe the wasteful things are not a major sources of climate change but ... the attitude is. Each individual youtuber/podcaster is taking the attitude "My income is more important than the environment" which is basically the attitude almost everyone takes and arguably in the exact same category as fast fashion etc.
Do you really need a Kurzgesagt calendar/poster/plushy shipped across the world to you? Flash Forward Podcast is always advertising you should subscribe to have gourmet beers shipped to you on subscription. Sean Carroll's Mindscape podcast shills for Bespoke Post to send you boxes of stuff you don't need every month. Isn't there some kind of disconnect between these shows telling us we should do more about climate change and then pushing exactly the kind of consumerism that brought us here?
It was sad to watch VOX try to justify traveling by plane 10-20 times a year.
1) A youtuber needs a certain amount of income to be able to afford the time to create their content. 2) Selling merch works way better than asking for donations 3) The positive impact of having the informational videos far outweighs the negative impact of creating and shipping the merch.
You can of course criticize the viewers for (2) and if you think spreading information has a low impact, you can question (3).
I mean you can make that same argument about almost anything "My 50k miles of air travel a year is important, yours isn't". "I need my giant house because I'm an influencer and invite lots of people over so I can convince them to save the environment". "If I don't look my best I'll never get the best opportunities which will make me rich and I can spend all my rich money on charity therefore I need all this fashion", etc...
The first thought in most people's minds when they hear of a crisis is "what can I buy to help?", and many others go straight to "what can I sell?"
At the very least, they could sell something that is actually useful, instead of crap merch that serves no other purpose than to sit on a shelf for a while before being thrown in the trash.
Even better, start using Patreon to fund their media content directly, and offer non-physical bonuses for higher tiers, like early access and exclusive content.
It's hard to break out of the current consumerist paradigm, especially for the average content creator. But they should as least try to do the least possible damage within that paradigm, while advocating for a better way.