Right? I keep a list of every single company/service that I gave my email address, physical address, or phone number to. Every time I give it out I add it to the list. When it needs changing I go through the list and update it in all of them.

They are no loops and repeated links to avoid. Every link leads to a brand new, freshly generated page with another set of brand new, never before seen links. You can go deeper and deeper forever without any loops.

Surely I am allowed to sell fictional maps? If I can sell a map of Middle-Earth, I can sell a map of a fictional world where a Gulf of Mexico exists.

But they did state the reasons, on their forums. At the time it was only known Honey steals money from affiliate link owners, not from users, and presumably it worked correctly for users.

So what do you think would happen if they encouraged viewers not to use it? “Hey we know this extension makes you money, but please don’t use it because we, millionaire YouTubers, are getting smaller profits when your do, and our profits are more important than your savings”. They checked with other creators, most of YouTube stopped promoting it at the time, and that was it. It would be seen as very self-serving to complain about it to users/viewers.

Doubled down? After being called out they slowed the upload cadence, are taking more time to make sure mistakes don’t get through, and changed their production process. They also formed a volunteer team of “beta tester” viewers who see each video pre-release to catch any mistakes they didn’t internally. I think they handled it well. Of course it would be better if they didn’t have a problem in the first place, but I’d never call it “doubling down”.