This page is very helpful. Pulling in DSPGaming's views and leaving the other stuff as is, it gives a monthly income of ~$1500, which is in the ballpark of what an average of $1-$2 CPM gives as well, so I'm feeling much better about it now. Thanks.
Rest assured I don't take Phil at his exact word. But because he doesn't do well at keeping a continuous lie, it's usually possible to put up bounds on things like this. Take, for instance, his early statements on his back state taxes. He would never give an exact amount, but he would say things like "it's not more then $10k". Okay, cool. So let's assume he's exaggerating (Phil? Never!) and cut it in half to $5k. All of a sudden, we get $5000 spread over ~2.5 years (this was 2014-2016), and we could take the highest possible business tax rate of 1.5% and back out ($5000 / 0.015 = $333,333 taxable income) that Phil was roughly making $100k+ in 2014-2016, even as he was crying poor then. Taken alone, that's flimsy at best, but when you look at his income from 2017 that was worked out, it came out to around $100k (minimum) as well. Since there were demonstrable changes that resulted in a drop in his income (losing Machinima, for instance), we can infer things about his previous income.
TL;DR: You're right, but there are, to use Phil's terminology, nuggets of truth contained within.
)
