I mean I get your sentiment, but you are only considering one side of this - income. They do have costs too, they have multiple employees they have to pay, and taxes on that pay and their own income, and depending on the legality where they are based, health insurance costs for their staff, pension contributions etc.... They may also have to pay for legal advice in these situations and that's not cheap, plus the costs for merch setup, although that does make a profit, it does take a good chunk to setup each phase at the time... the cuts that patreon take, that youtube take, the cuts that every company they engage with to make merch take....
I mean i'm not saying they will be poor, but you've gotta consider, they aren't just two ppl getting ALL the money they could be earning for themselves, they are a whole business these days, revenues AND costs come into it. you could see jeannie stressing about paying people...
Personally, I'm not brimming with sympathy for them, but that's not because they are "rich" because they might not even end up with much more than say a sillicon valley programmer or something...
But I have little sympathy because the way they behave... is to always try and push the boundaries with youtube, so they are like practically asking for this shit to happen. I get that youtube is unfair in how they enforce things, I really do dislike the double standards, and I have no love for youtube at all, I block ads on the platform for a reason..
But H&J have based their channel so much around trying to push the limits of what's allowed, and they KNOW that they are chancing it, because they've had so many near misses. Their entire business model is about trying to fly close to the sun and not get burned. The sexy woman clickbait thumbnail, but then a video nothing to do with that until the end model... the very careful designed censorship to try as much as possible to titilate, but then not quite go past the line... They know full well they are playing with fire when dealing with unreliable, unpredictable, unfair youtube. And on top of that... seriously, they are uploading every video like 6 times to "sample" different reviewers judgements before going public???
That's wilfully making more work for youtube just to try and game the system even more. It's cheeky as fuck, and youtube probably finally noticed - hey this channel is trying to game our review system and is costing us 6 times more staffing cost in manual reviews when plenty of channels do fine on automatic reviews... what's going on here?? Oh wait they are one of those channels trying to push things all the time....
You try and exploit youtube, who we know are cunts, you gonna get burned...
They know this, so little sympathy here.
I genuinely hope they get this resolved, and they keep their incomes nonetheless, and I am not gonna accuse them of fake upset patreon bait like some people, because honestly, I don't think either of them are good enough actors to not see through that if they tried....
But I do think they have kinda brought this on themselves, and they will know they did. Seriously, uploading 6 times to game/exploit the reviews... what were you thinking.....
I think the way to resolve this is for them to stop trying to bait an audience with sex/sexy content personally. If their actual content doesn't do AS well, then so be it, better to have a safer income than a bigger income. Get greedy, get burned.
And yes, youtube also is greedy and needs to be punished/regulated, but the reality RIGHT NOW until that happens, is power is all that matters and they keep poking the giant.