No, he's not clueless and he definitely knows how to manipulate his audience into buying his shtick, but at the same time he's a one trick pony. He knows how to push his audience into buying his crap (merch, "classes", etc), but he doesn't know how to keep them once they age out.
In the same sense, Onision was a smart youtuber too: he went with the trends and made an embarrassing amount of money, but as soon as people aged out and the times changed, he had no one left. Let's remember that he was basically on his own, crying that he had no money, far before his victims spoke up about the abuse and way before Chris Hansen got involved.
Sure, Jake is making a lot of money and is a good business man, but he already needs a base of brainwashed, dumb kids that spend too much time on the internet, for his schemes to work. If he didn't have a platform so big and established mostly through luck rather than hard work in the first place, would he be able to pull in the same numbers? Because I don't think so.