He was always a groomed fed plant. I would not be surprised if he's on the Epstein list somehow. It would certainly make sense with how many of his acolytes on this forum turn out to be pedophiles.
His earliest appearances were with a libertarian flag in his room extolling the virtues of the ideology and why we only need to cull illegal immigration and nothing else. I think his current disposition is the result of that ever-present downward spiral you see most lolcows fall into, where they double down and become more brazen over time with their insanity. I see parallels between him and Destiny, which is probably why they got on so well together.
Whilst being a coward + lolcow + narcissist doesn't discount him being a Fed outright, I think it's too much effort for ultimately little return. Pre-PewDiePie N-Bomb and the adpocolypse, it was really easy to make bank on all sorts of content, even the most contentious stuff; Fuentes got a ton of income and followers early on when the pickings were good and the algorithm was fair and he was able to daisy-chain it into his current... "empire", if you wanna call it that. I don't know if you've noticed, but a lot of the biggest political figures online at the moment were those who got their rise during this period, and I don't really think anybody new of note has entered the "scene" since, as it were. Like, the UK only has Sargon of Akkad and their main right-wing political commentator online - you would think during this period of political discontent, more would be flowering up, but there hasn't. No new American political commentators have come in either, the closest probably being Asmondgold, but he was big on Twitch before his occasional comments on politics. For much the same way Fuentes can be suspected of being a plant, Sargon could be viewed the same. Online discourse has largely been stagnant and so the political figures in the mid-2010s internet have made incremental changes to their views over time, some going slow but following a coherent line of thought (Sargon) but others making absolutely insane leaps and contradictions that make them look insane to people outside their community (Destiny & Fuentes).
TLDR: I'd argue Fuentes is a total embarrassment to the right-wing nowadays, and can be considered a detriment, but I think how he came to be is totally organic when you consider the state of pre-adpocolypse/pre-Charlottesville Youtube. You also see detrimental figures to the Left who inexplicably remain popular and successful who are spared the same accusations, such as Hasan Piker.