He's about the classiest content creator out there right now, so it's a bit disingenuous to attack him like that. He's like a cross of James Burke and Alton Brown, but focused on coffee. Dude is a veritable YouTube national treasure.
I can’t stand the majority of YouTubers, but James manages to come across as respectable and genuine. That’s perfectly compatible with him trying to be successful and playing the YouTube game a bit. In his position (and I don’t think he intended to become a ‘YouTuber’), you’d have to be either stupid or utterly uninterested in success not to.