I can't think of any kind of ethics that would see these as a positive thing. What's possible and makes money for you isn't necessarily good.

Can you explain how littering Youtube with low-quality copyright-infringing videos contributes anything to society?

Whoa hold on... We have to contribute to society now?!

It is not so easy to correlate income with contribution in the modern economic system. I am really good at making more datacenters and populating them with servers but it gets kinda nebulous when you try and relate that with direct benefit to society. Yes large corporations can get their compute and storage cheaper than if they had their own servers, but does this actually net benefit humanity? Not sure.

It's easier to realize you make money because its making other people money ( nothing to do with benefit though ).

I think there’s clear, intent-based copyright infringement at the very least.

Doesn’t journalism get some sort of a pass for certain copyright infringement?

In most countries, journalists can use portions of copyrighted materials under fair use. For example, a science reporter could use quotes from a published study to summarize their findings. That's not the same as a bot scraping a journalist's copyrighted work in it's entirety.

In addition to what the peer commenters have said, I don't believe that these videos are credibly "journalism".

No, although they often act like they do (e.g. using images from "social media").

You can use excerpts to comment on a work (e.g. review), but that's about it.

"unethical" and "clever" are not mutually exclusive.