Would YouTube be the behemoth it is without the plethora of content (some of it, high quality)? And if it being more lucrative for creators is what got that content, I would argue the platform as a whole is better. You could have the most whizz bang video platform, but without good content, what good is that?
With the money came the greed, the over-polished mass market content, and the ecosystem of creators is now mostly driven by engagement.
Not to mention all the topics that have been soft-banned because one algorithm flags those videos as not monetizable, and the next algorithm decides that only showing or recommending videos that can show ads results in the most add revenue
I don't think YouTube is clearly better or worse than it was before acquisition, and maybe an independent YouTube would have walked the same path. It is simply a very different platform that was ship-of-theseusd
Follow some channels like Practical Engineering or Veritasium ... both good quality, information dense. Yes, decent production values, but that's not a bad thing at all in my book.
