Could be noise but a red flag for me was the video thumbnail. It's been established that adding a person's portrait to a thumbnail increases engagement but why

Could be noise but a red flag for me was the video thumbnail. It's been established that adding a person's portrait to a thumbnail increases engagement but why did they feel the need to do that with their video? Like I would expect them to be optimizing for something intangible (maybe societal value idk) through their content not via some conformist YouTube trend.