Your thought is that monetization often depends more on visibility than performance and that getting views on any platform these days also requires marketing? Fair point.
Influencers often market things and make money off things other than being good at [name a skill or thing they are influencing]. For finance previous work has shown that financial influencers are are worse advice givers are actually the more popular ones.
My 2 cents TLDR: seize opportunity but based on sound analysis and caution, not blind optimism. I think they are saying something of the effect of:
1. The short trade (The Big Short or similar trades during the housing bubble) happened during a period of market euphoria. I.e. when most investors were irrationally confident and greedy.
2. Instead of sitting out or being fearful (as Buffett's original advice would suggest), the people who shorted the market took an aggressive position. They were indeed "greedy" in the sense of seeking profit, but they did so with deep awareness of the systemic risk that others were ignoring.
We analyzed hundreds of stock recommendation videos from finance YouTubers (aka finfluencers) and backtested the results. Turns out, doing the opposite of what they say—literally inverting the advice—beat the S&P 500 by over +6.8% in annual returns (but with higher volatility).