While I confess I have not watched the 18 hours of this analysis, in defense of a setting I am extremely fond of, I should point out that this is not a unanimously held opinion.
The 20ArabiaRPG youtube channel also did a multi-part analysis of the line (at least of the main setting box) at around the same time. This is a group of relatively young natives to the region (I think they are Yemeni or Qatari, from memory?) who were reading the product for the first time and reacting to it as they went (unfortunately, their newness to the product meant they read the two booklets from the Land of Fate box in the wrong order, which got confusing for all concerned). While they certainly found things that could be improved, they on the whole had a reasonably positive impression and ended up streaming a (regrettably short-lived) game in the setting.
Hi there! I'm the guy who wrote
Campaign Guide: Zakhara - Adventures in the Land of Fate, which is the 5th Edition conversion of Al-Qadim that folks mention above.
d20Arabia is headed by Ahmed Aljabry, who was our main cultural and language consultant on the book (we had a total of three consultants, but he worked with me/us far more and far more closely than the other two did). He is Yemeni (though last time I spoke with him he was living in western Saudi Arabia), and he provided a ton of great insight for our cultural and political sections. He is a funny, charming, and amazingly easygoing guy and was a delight to work with; if anybody reading this is looking for a consultant on West Asian culture and/or language they should should definitely look him up.
He did express some disappointment in the way the Asians Represent group approached their Al-Qadim review; he was one of the people in that review group, at least initially. I don't know if he remained through their entire process but I do know that a big part of why he did the d20Arabia piece was to provide a contrasting perspective.
It's interesting to me that while I'll happily concede that my book could have been much better, and there are definitely things I would do differently if I was starting it now, the main actual complaint I've seen/heard from people has been that we made an active choice not to focus on stuff like the slavery and misogyny presented as matter-of-fact in the original works. We made very few actual changes, we just didn't foreground things the way they had been before. An example of something we DID change was stuff like the age of one of the Grand Caliph's wives, who as written in the original Land of Fate box set would have been 15 or 16 when she married the early-40s-ish GC.
The cultural roots on which the setting is based may have included real-word examples of unions such as that, but we saw no need to even tacitly endorse such behavior in our work. If it's super important to someone to have child marriage in their game, absolutely nothing we do can or is intended to prevent that, and power to them I guess, but we were absolutely not going to have it in the baseline we were establishing.
And incidentally,
Tales of the Caliphate Nights is a most excellent work, and was written by our own Aaron Infante-Levy, whom I met here on EN World when he was heading an early 5e Al-Qadim conversion group. In fact, I originally wrote the Cities section of the Campaign Guide for that project; when that group fell apart I took my Cities work and later expanded it into the more complete setting guide.
