While I don’t watch them, I get the appeal of stuff like that or “flautist reacts to Jethro Tull” or whatever, because they could provide interesting insights into the technical aspects of stuff— like the jethro tull example, I don’t know if there are actually videos of that (I’d have to assume so!), but Ian Anderson has in incredibly bizarre technique since he’s self taught and therefore does things the technically-wrong way, which lends to his uniquely identifiable flute playing. If there was a video where a professional flautist is reacting to Jethro Tull and commenting on his embouchure, fingerings, and breathing technique, it could provide some really interesting insight for a budding flautist to see what makes Tull sound like Tull without falling into bad habits.
The videos I don’t understand are the ones where it’s just one or two people sitting in gaming chairs reacting to an incredibly popular song that they claim to have never heard before and feigning amazement, or likewise the videos where they’re reacting to some niche of music that they probably don’t have an interest in and act like they love it. Someone sent me a Frank Zappa reaction video once and it was this couple, and they listened to the song, did a whole exaggerated fake shock thing when the lyrics would get raunchy, gave a very shallow yet heavily flawed interpretation of message of the song, and then claimed it was amazing even though they seemed to be faking interest the entire time. Clicked thru a few of their other videos, just to see a few seconds of various different videos, and as I suspected each video was the exact same formula. They evidently don’t actually care that much about the music they’re being suggested and they frankly seem disinterested throughout most of them, and then claim it’s fantastic and ask their patrons to request the next song they react to. It seems like it’s just a bunch of middle aged music nerds who are willing to pay random YouTubers to pretend to like the music they like as some weird form of validation. It’s like a prostitutional version of being in high school showing a friend a crappy song you wrote, and having them tell you it’s great because they’re being polite. Idk… weirds me out.