Home brewing is one of the cheaper hobbies available (though like all hobbies you can spend as much as you want). The only real requirements are a bucket and a pot.
The hobby itself can get costly though. So much equipment to buy. And space.
Well, he also mentions getting a dog and a cat in that context. Recklessness is relative I guess.
The cat would certainly agree though I suppose, when it sees that dog walking in the door...
Before he was willing to make big sacrifices to “make it”.
And on the first step of the ladder to success he started taking on other responsibilities for fun.
While it is a crazy world and I don’t want to say no one has ever done what you described, it would be an outlier to say the least.
Home brewed beer is generally bottled or put into a keg and tapped.
(Almost) no one is just drinking warm uncarbonated beer from the fermenter.
The median Drinker / non teetotaler consumes about 0.5 drinks per day.
People with severe alcohol use disorder often consume 10 to 20 drink equivalents a day, most commonly cheap hard liquor.
Basically no alcoholic is going to be brewing a keg every couple days for self consumption.
I absolutely have friends who stopped home brewing because they realized that having a tap of readily available beer in their house wasn't a good idea.
If you want to find people doing that you look for the illegal drugs that haven't had wide spread industries drive down the price, like meth.
My point isn't that home brewing makes alcohol easier to obtain; clearly it doesn't, as you pointed out.
Rather, it provides a respectable rationale for having a beer (e.g. testing a batch, checking the bottle fermentation, seeing how it pairs with a meal).
Drinking is now part of a productive, interesting hobby. For most people that's harmless, but for a vulnerable individual, the hobby supplies frequent opportunities, a steady supply, and an intellectually respectable reason to consume. That's all.