Depends what you're into. People down voting others for expressing their opinion is just stupid. You're entitled to liking it, we're entitled to not like it. (I'm not saying you're the one who was down voting, of course.)

Re: transparency about bankrolling, i believe you since you say so. I’ve seen many of his videos and never heard him say so. I guess I just missed the ones where he did, or perhaps he said so on social media.

As for rigor, I can’t count the number of times he uses an unspecified amount of a chemical in a reaction, referring only to “throwing a bunch in.” But again, perhaps I’ve just watched the wrong videos.

His approach seems to me to be very “by guess and by gosh.” Part of that stems from trying to follow poorly written instructions in an academic paper; applied sciences grapples with that too. And some of it may be less slapdash that it appears, with Nilered using a deliberately casual tone in his scripts so that they’re more relatable, knowing that people aren’t likely to use his videos to attempt to reproduce his results. Even taking that into account though, given the number of attempts it often takes him to get the desired result, I doubt his rigor. Props to him for showing the failures and partial successes, though. And whatever else I say about him, I do generally find him entertaining.

Not gonna lie that's the channel I head to when I've run out of Nilered content. Been following his Cubane synthesis for a while now and it's been a crazy ride.