Does Esserman believe that his line has been refuted?!

I recently published a Chessable course titled Mop Up the Morra with the claim that Black is better in all variations if he follows my recommendations. I gave Esserman a chance to respond to this on stream, simply by pointing out the variation and that he failed to cover it, asking him how to respond. He did respond - but not to the line. Esserman criticized the cover, attempted to make me seem not credible due to my rating, made fun of me and the book, etc. After about an hour of this he calmed down somewhat, but you can occasionally still hear Esserman mockingly referencing my course on his nightly streams. He never once responded to my recommended lines. If this was so easy for him to counter, couldn't he have just pointed out why White was fine and moved on? Not only that, Esserman won't play his book's recommendations.

I recommended the following variation and analyzed it in great detail:

Recently, Esserman played the Morra against a friend of mine in an online blitz game. This friend had studied some of my course and apparently the game was a big enough deal for a fan of Esserman's to inform me of it on Chessable, as if Esserman's victory proved my variation wrong. On the contrary. My course covered the 11.Nd5 sacrifice that Esserman played and the friend who lost didn't know my recommendations well enough. Black is significantly better in this line, and Esserman himself admitted it in his book.

Here is an annotated game from my course on this variation. 

Why would Esserman avoid playing the variation he recommended and instead deliberately go for a line where he admitted that Black was better?