https://www.ribbonfarm.com/the-gervais-principle/
https://www.ribbonfarm.com/2017/08/17/the-premium-mediocre-l...
It's just his personality - I don't think it's a particular affection to try to sell more, although I do think a number of his readers are there because they like the idiosyncracy.
I also think that for posts like this, "are they based in fact and likely to be correct?" is the wrong question to ask. Posts about culture, worldview, systems thinking, etc are too broad to actually be "correct" - one way to see if this is the case in a domain is to ask yourself whether two different observers could observe the same facts, pick a different set to focus on, and draw entirely different conclusions (an exercise that Venkatesh frequently does on his blog). Rather, you read material like this for perspective. It's a way of training your brain to look at the same set of observations in an entirely different way. Then when you're faced with actual facts in your own life, you can apply the lens you just read about to it and see what the meaning of those facts is, and ideally shift rapidly between different perspectives to triangulate something approaching reality.
Wow, I think this last paragraph of yours manages to capture exactly what a philosophy or an ideology is for: perspectives to help create meaning.
My follow-up question then is: what makes for a "good" perspective? Can you judge it, to get back to the topic of this thread, by the number of mooks it enrolls?