To be fair, Handmade Hero also seems like a project designed to co-opt unearned feel-goods. Maybe one of the goals was to teach, but another goal was to actually ship a game, and he took pre-orders for it before eventually abandoning development. It turns out it's a lot easier to talk about making good programs than it is to actually make them. I do think it is possible to make high-quality handmade software, but being performative about doing so rather than just doing the thing is probably counterwise to ever actually just doing the thing.
The goal was always, first and foremost, to teach. This is super obvious from the announcement trailer alone[1], where he says the point of the project is to pass on a way of life that inspired him. If Casey wanted to make money from a game he wouldn't have bothered with thousands of hours of Twitch streams.
I for one feel like my 15$ spent on Handmade Hero were well served by having access to the source code and the breadth of video that annotates every line of code. I think anyone that looked at he proposition that Casey made as something more than a way to support him, was naive.
