The tone deafness is it, you've put it better words that I could. It doesn't matter to me whether he was right or wrong about it, he still manages to come across as abrasive at best or smug and shitty at worst. Like, let Luke talk about it instead or something.

Linus has to keep sponsors happy

Meaning that for Linus you are the product, and the advertisers are the real customers.
Again meaning the videos are not made for you, they are made for the advertisers.

That’s an extreme accusation

Yes, and I can make it without fear of him suing me, because it's true.

It was pretty obvious if you have more than 2 brain cells and the ability of critical thinking.
But Gamers Nexus actually gave examples of obvious "conflicts of interests":
https://youtu.be/FGW3TPytTjc?t=1575

This is actually from way after I stopped viewing LTT trash, but I can't just go back multiple years and dig up the evidence.
But if you really are curious, you would have to track his "sponsors" and compare them to his "reviews". And the evidence will quickly be pretty clear.

For instance it was very obvious that after AMD became a major sponsor around 2018, Radeon suddenly got way better reviews.
Raja had tried to suck up to him, and give him special treatment and privileges of first access with the Vega release, which didn't work the slightest. But when they became a sponsor THAT WORKED!

And when Intel stopped their sponsoring of him, he suddenly made several features complaining about how bad Intel was. This was at least true, it's just funny how the criticism didn't come out until they stopped paying him.
Intel stopped supporting YouTube reviewers in general, but other channels did not suddenly switch how they reviewed Intel.

LTT is corrupt as hell, to the point he may use his popularity for extortion. He probably doesn't think so himself, because he seemingly doesn't have the intelligence to see that what he is doing is wrong, unless it is pointed out to him very clearly.

But if you don't have eyes to see what's going on, I really can't help you.

That is not the reality as I see it. They don't hide the fact that it's a sponsored video (marked as "sponsored video") until the end of the video. They seems mindful to always disclose conflict of interest (everytime framework, the NAS company) and they stopped working with Anker publically and immediately when the eufy camera scandal broke. They seem to hold them selves to a high ethical standard and disclose information even though it paints them in a negative light (they admitted they knew honey was swapping advertiser links but they didn't make it a big story)

Source: I watch around 2-3 LTT videos per week and around 50% of the WAN show podcast

I used to watch less because I couldn't bring myself to click on the god-awful distasteful thumbnails but then I installed "dearrow" and sponsorblock and they are more than tolerable.

Not that it makes it any better, but that just seems like typical business practices. Almost everything we watch in America is an advertisement.

Youre forgetting that time they did a scrapyard war which was sponsered by dbrand, in which somebody was constantly in view, playing on a switch with a dbrand skin.