Wired in particular has a weird fascination with criticizing YouTube and YouTubers. It's a pretty transparent attack by one media that is losing attention against another media that has the attention. You can see it to some extent with how other media formats report on Facebook as well. It's not just a war for attention, its a war to reduce the ad budget that gets spent on the competing platform.
In particular for Wired making articles like "Pewdiepie is a nazi" or "YouTube is full of paedophiles" isn't just about reporting, or even clickbait to attract views. They also specifically mention ads in these type of articles as a way to hurt the bottom line ad revenue of YouTube by trying to scare advertisers away from advertising on YouTube.
Saying “hey big advertisers do you know your ads are showing up on this hideous thing” is one of the few ways available to try to get some sense of moral accountability to one of these platforms. Reporting individual pieces of content or individual users does nothing, if it’s drawing paid views there will be another person doing the same thing that the system will be quite happy to start promoting until they, too, get reported.
Case in point, as long as YouTube is beholding to the wims of advertisers, free speech is a dying thing on youtube. The same thing goes for how they are handling copyright strikes etc. They should be taking an aggressive stance to crack down on people who abuse the reporting system (e.g. ban an IP if it has X false reports, use the content ID system to actually detect whether it is fair use and whitelist those cases, which is easy to detect because it's based literally on how long the borrowed portion of the video is), instead of just assuming every report is 100% legit.