Yeah, watching him in action I can see why there are memes and stuff about the guy. Good lord, but he's skilled.
I watch him with a skilled painter from a family of painters, and 95% of the commentary is on how he's painting the same five or six paintings over and over using the laziest technique possible. It's to the point where after a few dozen episodes we can predict everything he says and does before he does it.
One of those patterns: begin with a lavender sky. Add a couple horizontal blobs of white with grey undersides. BLEND THE SHIT OUT OF THE CLOUDS. Add three to five flattened triangles as peaks, one set closer than the other set to the viewer. BLEND THE SHIT OUT OF THE MOUNTAINS. Add white to one side of the ridgelines. BLEND THE SHIT OUT OF THE LIGHT HIGHLIGHTS. Add a dark shade to the other side of the ridgelines. BLEND THE SHIT OUT OF THE SHADOWS. BLEND THE SHIT OUT OF THE BASES BECAUSE YOU GOTTA HAVE MIST. Start painting small evergreens in the middleground at the base of the front set of mountains. After the first half-dozen, start drawing lazy sticks and triangles instead. BLEND THE SHIT OUT OF THOSE TREES. Use white to draw a shoreline at the bottom of the grey blob of evergreens. DRAG THE TREES DOWN AND BLEND THE SHIT OUT OF THEM FOR REFLECTIONS. Paint a GIANT FUCKING EVERGREEN ON ONE SIDE IN THE CLOSE FOREGROUND. Add one to two slightly smaller evergreens beside it. Now paint a bunch of blobs of green at the base of all the evergreens in both the front and middleground instead of showing where they enter the earth, then BLEND THE SHIT OUT OF THOSE BUSHES. Add thin white highlights at random to the trunks of the evergreens, stop arbitrarily after ~10-15s. Add splotches of either bright color or white depending on the season to the bushes, then BLEND THE SHIT OUT OF THEM AGAIN. Finally, make a bunch of shitty finishing touches and stop before the painting's really done because the producer is telling you that you're out of time. Insert errors ranging from minor to hilarious at random. If you ever have any texture at all, if your painting is not perfectly flat and smooth, you are dishonoroburu failure and must commit sudoku. There, now you know how to paint mountain scenes like Bob Ross.
That's not to say that it's bad in terms of inclusiveness or commercial success, since "blend fucking
everything since it's easy and helps hide all your mistakes and lazy work" is probably the best way to get a lot of people started with painting.
What makes Bob cool isn't his painting. He's a shitty painter. He's cool because his attitude is fucking hilarious and he's generally either stoned as shit or high on life.