I don't think the influencer thing is 100% negative. Some of it makes my skin crawl.
I follow a few people on youtube that get promotional products like bikes and equipment. Overall, I have a healthy outlook on that part of marketing in my small world. It does annoy me when I see influencers outside of that.
Example, I follow a mountain biker that travels the US and Canada hitting the trails. Good content. Rates the trails, bikes, components, and has a great insight into his lifestyle with all the ups and downs and brings up things that someone form that outside would have a hard time considering.
He recently did a van build where he lives in the van full time. The conversion was fascinating. Then we got suggested links to other van people. I didn't know this was a huge YT and IG thing. People get millions of subs and views just from living in a Sprinter type van. And they do nothing. They just travel and have awful and annoying content because they do nothing. And people throw money at them to do nothing thanks to Patreon.
Your post basically comes off as "when its things I'm not into, it makes my skin crawl, but if its with stuff I am into I love it!" Which...well is kinda exactly the issue. You can see inherent flaws in it, but if it is helping stuff you're into you're ok with it. But you're not willing to accept that maybe other people value that other content in the same way you value the content you think is good or that people might like less of the "how the sausage is made" stuff.
People will just look at things as though its some weird fandom thing, which I hate as it causes weird cult-like idiocy. Like, I bet the content you think is great is a lot more "produced" (paid for I mean) than you realize, even the ones that seem transparent about it often leave out a lot of the stuff.
I have to take a break from even ones that I like (or get value out of) as there's just something off about content that is so focused around those types of situation (for instance LinusTechTips videos are just total ads, and so its weirdly extra jarring when we get the sponsor bit on top of it - so he's basically promoting some product and he'll be honest about them sending it and things like that, and then he segways into the sponsor and its similar yet different and yet if you're watching it in the background the repetition of the sponsor stuff would definitely be able to work on you subconsciously). In the past when it would be just say a magazine every month, you'd kinda get some break/isolation where your brain can kinda reset. Now you're just constantly overwhelmed with it all the time and people so rarely take a step away that they're not able to discern things properly (kinda like the PewDiePie fans that got pissed when he was called out for how often he made Nazi/white supremacist references - ones that were not negative it needs to be pointed out; to his viewers it was just offbeat "comedy", but to people not embedded around that it was like "WTF?" and was really noticeable; to be fair to him, I do believe he is genuine in that he isn't one and wasn't meaning it to be positive just that I think he thought it was amusing because it was ironic but he didn't realize that's how actual white supremacists groups have been trying to seed their rhetoric back in pop culture by "hiding it in plain sight" by making it a joke but also making sure that it wasn't "fuck Nazis" kinda stuff and for so much of his audience Nazis are like some abstract that I'm not sure they can even comprehend).
Another thing that gets me is how yeah, to keep the income through that stuff you have to keep adjusting, so you have a lot of these doing wider appeal stuff. Why is a clothing focused channel doing a PS4 unboxing video? Why are there 50 billion PS4 unboxing videos? Because Sony was giving out PS4s to every remotely popular social media brand/person in exchange for making an unboxing video because that type of repetition actually works as brainwashing. There's been a bunch of other ones as well.
The other thing is that those influencers, its fucking their minds up too, as so many of them are going to have a tough time looking at things without going "hmm, would this get me views?" or going shopping without thinking "wonder if I could get this free if I shill for it". Hell, so many of them are having to constantly shill shit (even when its not something they're getting paid/sponsored to), because they have to keep the eyeballs there, so every new popular thing they have to have a video about it. That would make me fucking miserable. But the thing is, if you just follow a limited amount you could miss it, but if you watch a variety, you start going like "WTF, why is every fucking thing about Red Dead Redemption?" When I notice that going on, even when its something I like that is the focal point of it, I usually take a break from like YouTube stuff as a whole because so much of the content is really apparent and it almost always comes with a noticeable drop in quality of said content. And when its fanbases that had already willingly become basically cults prior to this, its outright insufferable (the Star Wars "George Lucas raped my childhood" people really piss me off because they're too stupid to recognize that he did that because he brainfucked them as kids since his money was made so much off the toys and merchandising; but then there's ones that do recognize that and are not only fine with it but want more of it - but then these idiots tend to be ones that try to defend the Prequels or claim that the recent Disney Star Wars movies are great; which Star Trek people are fucked too maybe even worse as they'll admit a ton of the Trek stuff is shit, but still support it - they're like real life versions of Fry from Futurama).
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