It's a combination of several things. First thing that hiatus really really really hurt him financially, people have mentioned that he lost around half of his subscribers during the hiatus. The other thing is he had a really bad investment with the merchandise store he used to partner with, I don't know the full details but from what I gather when he talks about it now and again he ended up having to own all the merchandise and be responsible for storing it, which sounds extremely expensive. I'm sure did he had enough put away to handle one of those two disasters, but the combination of both of them would hurt anybody short of a PewDiePie or Mr beast.
The third thing is the general trend both YouTube and twitch trying to evidence the profitability of those websites to their speculative investors, which means that content creators are increasingly getting a smaller cut and are increasingly pressure to make SEO content. Which would probably explain why Vinnie made more SEO friendly thumbnails for a little while there, but since a lot of his fans are very autistic and autistic people hate change he stopped doing that.
And as far as Vinny complaining about not making as much money as he thinks he should while also saying nobody has to subscribe, that originates from Vinny Being too nice of a guy. Vinny has told a story where somebody sent him some ridiculously large donation and then email him a sob story about not being able to pay rent or something so he felt obligated to refund the charge, and he does not want to have that experience again.
