I have no special love for Linus Tech Tips, but a lot of the defences used by Fairphone are quite weak in my opinion.
"It's better than the Fairphone 4" doesn't really matter when I'm comparing the Fairphone to a Pixel phone.
"Who needs to watch 10 hours of Youtube"? Very few people do, but half the battery life in video decode means charging your phone twice as often even if you don't watch Youtube all day. The unfortunate SIM card/SD card slot placement is also just that, unfortunate; there are good reasons for them to be placed there, but other phones have sliders or slots that will let you live swap either card without even taking the back off, and I think the way Fairphone approached it is suboptimal. It not being designed for easy swapping doesn't mean that people who do want easily swappable cards are wrong for having their preferences, especially when so many thinner, faster, cheaper phones can do the same just fine.
The inefficient SoC that gets Fairphone 8 years of support is nice, especially for a company that small, but with Google and Samsung also offering 7 to 8 years of support on their phones, it becomes much less impressive. Five years ago, this would've been a gamechanger, but right now, they're doing marginally better than their competition at the cost of a huge dip in performance. What's worse, is that regardless of it being their fault or not, Fairphone has a relatively spotty history when it comes to patching.
The software gripes Linus seems to take issue with seem to be the LineageOS/Android defaults, or the Google parts (i.e. the stupid Google launcher that Google forces its partners to use, unless you want to ship your own). Still, promises of "we will fix the software in an update" are meaningless to a consumer buying a phone now. I've read plenty of "we will patch this" comments from manufacturers over the years, and without a definitive timescale, those promises are worthless.
For a customer who wants the best phone for their money, the Fairphone is objectively worse. It's marketed at the niche segment of people who are willing to spend extra for a mid-tier phone to get more environmentally and socially conscious hardware. And you know what? I don't disagree with Linus' suggestion at the end: even the fairest phone is environmentally costlier than rescuing an old second hand phone.
Most people will be incredibly unhappy with a Fairphone 5 if the alternative would've been a Pixel 8. I think it's fair for LTT to review the phone from a general consumer point of view.
Of course, LTT is also hypocritical as balls, as very similar problems and the very same insane price-to-quality difference is also present for Framework laptops. Expensive hardware, meh software, many suboptimal design choices.