Carter needs a new laptop. His daily driver has been falling apart for ages but he refuses to give it up.
We all told him about the sound mix - he let a couple of videos slip with a bad "mono as single-channel stereo audio" renders. On his machine it sounded normal. He got flack for that, and he's been hearing this for months.
I'm going to show him this thread. I don't think he'll ever forget to check again.
Despite that, he's a really talented guy. Chalk this up as a bad production deploy. We didn't want to delete and re-upload since the videos had legs when we first released them. There's a checklist now.
Lol I wish YT had a warning for that.
In the meantime, good old
Settings -> Accessibility -> Audio -> Play Stereo as Mono
helps.