Youtube is a weird fucking beast.
It's a first class media type. It is definitely the new Television. But no one is making money from youtube ads, and external services (sponsors, patreon, and so on) is where the money is. But the *value proposition* of Youtube is supposed to be money.
But the value is obviously discoverability. Not even just the recommendation engine, but because if you search for a thing, Google will give you YouTube links early in the listings, and lots of people search for media on YouTube first. To the point I suspect it's the most popular music, book, video, and podcast platform.
There's literally no value to youtube basically. But because of how centralized everything got, it's nearly impossible to break out of. We *just* need better tools to search the web. It's literally all we need. And because of that, they're all getting incredibly bad.