I speak hindi, and in fact he is actually encouraging spam and is BSing in the response. He has said to look for repos with low traffic and do a pull request changing the readme and to do it 20 times, so if most will be marked as invalid, at least 4 wont.
This is literally how DigitalOcean is advertising their program, too. It’s just that they intended their audience to be people who fully understood the goal of what this was supposed to be, and the YouTube video was watched by many who didn’t.
Hindi is my native language. CodeWithHarry, in fact, is actually subliminally asking the users to create very low quality PRs. Or at least very heavily implying it.
In one part of the video he mentions that last year DO was not able to distribute all the t-shirts as they didn't have enough PRs. He goes on to mention that "this year, we don't want any T-shirts to remain".
If I get time, I'll point out more lines from the video where he is promoting PR for the sake of PR.
I do agree that it may not be totally his fault in the whole larger context of things.
I looked at the video and it seemed fine. Only problem is that complete rookies were watching it too.
I hang out in some rookie forums and it seems like every other day someone posts a snippet and I find that they have used foo/bar somewhere in the code without realizing it was supposed to be a placeholder. CWH made a tutorial on how to get some text from your computer into an open source repository and that is commendable, but his viewers have forgotten to do the bit where they actually produce content worth merging and that is not his fault.