I don't blame him - he got successful at an early age(and famous AF). He did most of it by himself, and when it came time to expand into a bigger team, he hired mostly inexperienced people, some of them being his childhood friends.
Yes, he's diva and has a big head(watched other VS members vlogs and seen what David's actually like outside his own vlogs) - obviously, he's famous, influential, and rich, leads the group, etc., so I'd imagine it'd be tough not to. And when you have a bunch of friends working for you - they'd just turn into "Yes men" and not correct his course when needed, rather just leech of him while they can. Almost every single friend that works for him has now their own influencer biz.
He came up on YouTube at a time when YouTube was still figuring out its monetization policies. Benefitted massively from it(earlier vlogs with equally offensive jokes were monetized when they came out - he used to make ~300k/mo on AdSense in the first couple of years into vlogging). So he never had a chance to really think about the content of his vlogs, until 2017 when the Logan Paul event hit, and YT started penalizing other creators too. Again - David was already doing brand deals by now and making merch, so the new policies didn't threaten him as much as they did other creators who only had that one source of income.
So yeah - this is the first time David's hit any adversity in his career, and combine that with the circumstances around him(having friends in his team, getting hosting and judging gigs and mainstream sponsors despite questionable content, etc) - he thought he could sail through this one without being harmed. His audience engagement was probably one of the highest in the entire industry - which might be the reason sponsors flocked to get him to promote them too. Not anymore.
TW
Which I feel a little sad about. I'm not blaming the entire SA event on him - Dom's the culprit and he's not getting enough attention(David brings more clicks, and that's exactly why he was targeted by the media outlets, no question about it). Dom could have chosen to treat Hannah in a completely different way, and David could have still have pulled off that bit, without Dom actually having to do what he ended up doing. This is assuming David didn't know this is how Dom would treat them. If he knew - he truly f'd up.
Still rooting for David, hope he makes up for everything, cleans up his act, and gets back to creating content. I can imagine he isn't allowed to get out of his house(for security reasons) and not posting ANYWHERE, which would be brutal amongst all of this.