Yeah, he always felt slimy to me. His "charity" videos that seem to take advantage of impoverished people and him convincing children to promote his chocolate brand (and sabotage competitors) as examples. I hate that someone who seems to be this bad was able to have this power in the first place but boy do I love seeing him be brought down. Hopefully it doesn't just go away like so much else does.
In general he is not a nice person when criticized. This is usually obvious in his content and social media interactions.
His content is low quality, 'feel good', Reality TV garbage. Think like Dude Perfect; except they give out giant wads of cash and recruit random people. He has TWO FAILED BRANDS; Mr. Beast Burger, which is a chain of low quality ghost kitchens, and his Chocolate brand; which shows a clear lack of business acumen and capability. Much of his video content is clickbait; written explicitly to game the algorithm and garner attention with only minimally required guardrails to obey ToSes and relevant laws that are actually enforced. Frequently he invades other YouTuber's channels for a video or more to "promote his brand" and spread his junky content around. This is sometimes fine; when the channel is celebrity centric or otherwise good at staying on it's own topic; but I've heard...horror stories from certain youtubers about working with Mr. Beast...and even the Greens, (John and Hank, vlogbrothers) don't seem to like him all that much it seems like; as evidenced by their large lack of interactions with him. Sure, they 'professionally respect' him; but that's about as far as that seems to go. I think a lot of Nerdfighteria (Fans of the vlogbrothers) doesn't seem to interact with Mr. Beast that much and it makes me wonder.
There's still a ton of good content on YouTube, just because the big faces in the trending tab all suck shouldn't discount people like Dan Hurd or Dustin Porter, no native advertising, good content made for the fans. You just have to dig
YouTube promotes clickbait because it gets more engagement than other videos. Even if people comment on it to say it sucks or it's wrong, bad, distasteful, doesn't matter. That means, ad bids on these videos go for a higher amount because more people see them. As an advertiser, would you rather want your ad to play on the 20 click video from some obscure channel that infrequently puts up videos of varying focus or would you want them to show on the YT-play-button-in-the-background, engagement-optimized video?
Long gone are the days when YT was a video sharing platform. It's a giant marketplace and the fanciest shop with the loudest criers gets the promotion while visitors are the product.