I would be pissed if it was presented as a thing that required expert consultation from wendel.

The thing is, such consultation is also providing the same information to the audience, so its not just for Linus, Luke and Elijah. If you're diving in without the last 10-30 years of background knowledge of what's broken, what's been forked, which forks are worth running, which organizations are in chaos and which keep quietly pushing good code, having someone give you a quick rundown of "here, you'll want to run this or this distro, use this software for XYZ and right now its best to run games this way, oh and this launcher/game is completely broken on Linux so skip it for now" skips a lot of the friction that Linus is subjecting himself to. And any normal person would ask their Linux-user friend, ask in a relevant discord or ask on a relevant subreddit and get roughly the same thing. The collaboration and consultation provides this same information in a video-friendly manner is the main difference.

Do the viewers learn anything useful by seeing Linus experience a problem, spin theories on the spot while troubleshooting, then cut to finding a forum post explaining a possible fix, and Linus tries it possibly fixing it/possibly not? The viewers certainly learn less than if they saw some of that, then got to see a more experienced creator explain what's going on, what should have happened and how to fix/prevent it moving forwards. The video stops being just watching people flailing and instead becomes "here's what they did, here's what they should have done so you now know don't have to go through the same thing!"

Its a similar concept as any video where LTT has an enterprise vendor help out with the initial configuration or leans on the enterprise support to fix/explain something. Instead of guessing and potentially misleading the audience of millions, they can get a much more accurate solution/explanation in the same video