Yeah it rubs me the wrong way when he treats his workforce as his personal tech peasants by getting them to do ridiculously luxurious upgrades at his house.
Sure they get paid but he's often getting stuff free or discounted from sponsors installed by his employees essentially for free as he gets to claim their wages as a tax discount all so his primary school aged kids can have their third $5000 gaming rig so they have a computer on every floor of the house.
Personally I would tell him to get fucked, it's insulting to his employees.
I'm sure those videos do make significantly more money than they cost though. People are definitely clicking on them. And he also does expensive sponsored upgrades for (a few of) his employees. Of course he does do a lot more of those for himself though.
He makes fun of his employees so much tho when visiting their home. Bruh you don't pay them enough for their homes to be 10% as nice as your own douchebag!
And the workers make just as much fun of Linus, if not even more. It's not a one way street, and it's clear that Linus only does it when he knows the other person will also find it funny. It's nothing more but humorical banter between people that know each other quite well.
Also lots of those "upgrades" are things that wouldn't have happened at all, if it weren't for a video. And seeing how much fun the workers have in those videos, I find it quite unlikely that they feel insulted doing them.
Also, did we forget that the ultimate tech upgrade is a thing? The series where the workers get quite beefy upgrades to their very own homes, and it's not even limited to pc's. Linus even personally painted at least a couple of the workers walls lol, so I'm pretty sure "the workers being held as peasants" is quite far from the truth.