That's a silly and obtuse take. By this logic you can never lose a job or source of income.
He clearly states "My income dropped almost immediately", which makes it clean that he was earning money from it, and that a specific event—the piracy—coincided with a drop of "$Xk worth of sales" per month.
The analogy being drawn is to losing a job and consequently losing the income you would have earned from it. You've switched from "you never had that income" to "you never had that job".
It's like saying "I lost a Tesla because Elon Musk hasn't given me one." It's a pathos appeal by trying to paint the speaker as a victim to generate enough sympathy that you stop reasoning logically. Claiming to have lost money you never had is exactly as absurd when you eradicate the appeal to emotion embedded within it.
YouTube videos that hit ~1M views famously rarely keep up the pace beyond a week or a month. Hard to find data, but what I’ve heard is that after a year or two, looking back, most popular videos get 75-85% of their views in their first month after release.
Unless you have a contract to be regularly paid $X, or constantly put out new and engaging content, you really can’t get mad when your income peaks and then nosedives.
I'm sorry but, you can't claim something as a loss if you never had it in the first place. The RIAA's members tried the same propaganda and it didn't work then either.
I've published a few short stories and made $27.00. Like 99.999% of authors cannot live off of writing. It's like acting. If you include all the actors the average yearly salary is like $2,000. Some fields are just like that, and I'm not convinced that there's anyway to change that for either career. Nor am I convinced it should be. With programming I'm not paid for the work I've done, I'm paid for the work I continue doing. Why is writing supposed to be any different? Because publishers like it that way? They pay the author once, and get paid for 120 years?
And honestly as an author my biggest issue isn't that I'm not making much money, it's that almost no one is reading my work. I didn't do it for the money. And if I could charge less than $1 on amazon, I would.