Geerling's titles have been increasingly click-bait for a while now. It's pretty sad, because I like his content, but hate the click-bait BS.
Youtube demonstrably wants clickbait titles and thumbnails. They built tooling to automatically A/B test titles and thumbnails for you.
Youtube could fix this and stop it if they want, but that might lose them 1% of business so they never will.
They love that you blame creators for this market dynamic instead of the people who literally create the market dynamic.
Don’t hate the player, hate the game.
The ones that are dead straight with no clickbait are 10/10 (the worst performers), and usually by a massive margin. Even with the same thumbnail.
The sad fact is, if you want your work seen on YouTube, you can't just say "I built a 10 node Raspberry Pi blade cluster and ran HPL and LLMs on it".
Some people are fine with a limited audience. And that's fine too! I don't have to write on my blog at all—I earn negative income from that, since I pay for hosting and a domain, but I hope some people enjoy the content in text form like I do.