I think one of Nicks problems is he's incapable of having a similar take to anyone else. This works fine when he's the hardcore right winger in the room, it's what set him apart from more mainstream commentators. But when it's on normal things that everyone likes he has to have something different. So he has to come up with some issue with gun ownership, he has to come up with a reason to hate the countryside, he has to have strange opinions about age of consent.
And this is one of the things fueling his downward spiral. His identity is about challenging conervative narratives from a right wing online position. So he has to come with new ideas as his older stuff gets more mainstream. This is where his strange ideas about China come from. He sees the mainstream take and comes up with something else, not to be right but to be different.
And because of this, he can't engage with the Gab crowd, they don't like his takes and he needs to use a chink of his show (That they don't watch) to explain his odd ideas in more detail. So he remains stuck with his current audience, which isn't growing because theres not enough new people discovering him.
But it cuts into his audience too. He can't keep doing this because as his more acceptable ideas become mainstream (even the race and jew stuff) his stranger stuff replaces it. And for a lot of people it's getting too strange, so they go for more mainstream stuff beause they're more right wing now. I'm personally in this camp.
So he can't grow his audience, and they're slowly leaving, resulting in the death spiral you're seeing. He said dumb things before but it's clearly gotten worse. The funny thing is he's capable of dropping all the edgelording when theres someone elses camera pointed at him. When he goes on Alex Jones he's much more optical, and much less of an online sperg. I think this really became an issue around the time he lost his twitter. He previously was forced to not be too out there because everyone could see it and call him out, like they do on gab. But his less public twitters don't have that problem. He doesn't have a wide audience to appeal to, it's just his guys, so he can get away with worse takes.
I think the way he solves this is writing down and publishing exactly what his thoughts are on everything. Set the Nick Fuentes Ideology in stone. Say what is good and what is bad. Give his followers something to set up as the base of a worldview that can be compared to everyone else. But he won't do that because he needs flexibility and irony to hide behind whenever his takes get too weird. Plus it requires work for no gain, which he doesn't like.