Which of your favorite creators content quality went downhill very quickly?
Kind of a trend, the amount of youtubers who i had loved but their content became generic after gaining popularity is quite a bit, most drastic one being mrwhosetheboss, his uniqueness went down faster than MH27 MH17
Seems like they never recovered after the whole YouTube Red exclusive stuff they did. I was glad they came back, but you're right, it just doesn't hit the same.
I think Vsauce is a lot more grifty than he looks. If you look at the really early videos they were very different and he changed his content wildly in order to find something that makes the most money with the least work. The science education happened to be profitable but as the Meta started favouring more than 10+ min and science vids became mini documentaries he just dropped off and started reviewing science toys and do compilation videos. Right now he is doing a lot of shorts because they are being pushed by the algorithm.
I started watching VSauce well over 10 years ago, so I've experienced how his content changed first-hand. I feel VSauce dropped off when Michael became an internet meme, when VSauce made it "big". They got their own studio, their own merch box, and I thought this was going to be an upgrade to the content between VSauce 1, 2 and 3. But then Michael made that YouTube Red series and that was basically a brick wall.
Only Jake Roper still made some good videos for some time, but that stopped eventually too. Mindblow stopped, Build It, Draw It, Play It stopped. Instead of seeing anything that would justify having a studio and a team to work with we basically got, like you said, Michael reviewing toys from their merch box, and Kevin doing some math philosophy once in a while.
Mindblow is technically back but... it lacks any energy or soul that the original Mindblow had. It's sad...
His side gigs are super grifty. Curiosity box was a straight scam. Two months delayed and full of shifty products that break or fall apart trying to assemble them.
Vsauce2 is still good and mindblown just recently came back, Kevin basically said on his podcast that the mindblown videos just take too much time to research for something that's presented extremely fast and short, since he's not a tabloid making wildly innacurate reporting on science papers.