The video by Veritasium is by a guy who literally got a PHD on the subject of making physics more approachable through videos. He is exactly the person I would expect to provide a more clear and understandable explanation.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=S1tFT4smd6E&feature=youtu.be...

Why doesn't he work with the actual astronomers, then?

You don't have to watch his channel for very long to learn that he often does (see his video about the recent gravitational wave detection [1], plus a bunch more).

[1] https://youtu.be/iphcyNWFD10

Just by sharing the news he is working with them helping the global effort.

Because he’s busy making physics more approachable through videos.

Perhaps I should have phrased it as "why don't astronomers work with _him_?"

Different target audiences for a science YouTube channel and a scientific findings press conference.

It'd be extremely shocking if he hadn't been able to. The math has been known for a very long time the largest differences would be based on the orientation of disk relative to us but that has been mostly known since the original Hubble picture. If he'd been significantly wrong that'd mean our understanding of the physics was wrong or something unknown was happening at a pretty large scale.

Everyone knew what the image was going to look like, so it's not any harder to prepare in advance.