I've been in the industry for a couple decades.
Sure I'm being a bit reductive, but I've seen it time and again the last couple years. It's not that "the chuds" directly impact sales, it's that they dramatically influence the consumer journey and greatly impact discoverability.
If you're posting on this forum, what some ill intended YouTubers videos are not going to have any influence on you. It isn't your primary source of information, it's not how you discover games, and you're already well educated. A game will reach a set of its intended core audience with or without social media discourse.
But in today's day of AAAA sales needs due to costs, that's not really enough anymore. The core basis are so fragmented, there's so much choice and so many highly engaging games, that reaching beyond those consumers is never more challenging than it is today. Those consumers rely on social media and YT to discover a game.
And if ill intended content, monetized outrage, bandwagoning, grifting etc is favored by the algorithm, which it is, it's a massive uphill battle to even reach consumers with a message about your game that is intended, or pure. We don't run ads in our trailers and gameplay videos, we don't monetize our content - we monetize our games - but if people are making money off monetizing your content, there's money to be made outside of the gaming company for creators and platforms, they milk that shit.
It's hard to Breakthrough, it's hard to influence the narrative, and that indeed is what effects sales.
You used to be able to sponsor content, not to influence sentiment, but at least to get a message through the noise, but these days so many influencers have managed to sew doubt on sponsored content and media integrations (mostly because they were losing out on money), that sponsored content doesn't perform as well and in fact many creators don't even want to take deals now because they can make more shitting in the game anyway.
So yes when I (albeit without much nuisance) complain about chud or grifter content hampering a games chance at reaching a larger audience, I'm just really tired of it happening again and again and seeing so many friends lose their jobs over it. Sad. Industry is struggling on how to respond to it, especially as gaming creators want to keep being inclusive. I don't think it's a winning battle right now