highly recommend going through this well thought out piece by Ben Thompson - he is getting bulled up

stratechery.com - The youtube tip of the google spear

"The Giant in Plain Sight

Of course TikTok wasn’t the first company to figure this out: YouTube was the first video platform, and from the beginning focused on building an algorithm that focused more on giving you videos you were interested in than in showing you what you claimed to want to see.
YouTube, however, was and probably always has been my biggest blind spot: I’m just not a big video watcher in general, and YouTube seemed like more work than short-form video, which married the most compelling medium with the most addictive delivery method — the feed. Sure, YouTube was a great acquisition for Google — certainly in line with the charge to “organize the world’s information and make it universally accessible and useful” — but I — and Google’s moneymaker, Search — was much more interested in text, and pictures if I must.
The truth, however, is that YouTube has long been the giant hiding in plain sight: the service is the number one streaming service in the living room — bigger than Netflix — and that’s the company’s 3rd screen after mobile and the PC, where it has no peer. More than that, YouTube is not just the center of culture, but the nurturer of it: the company just announced that it has paid out more than $100 billion to creators over the last four years; given that many creators earn more from brand deals than they do from YouTube ads, that actually understates the size of the YouTube economy. Yes, TikTok is a big deal, but TikTok stars hope to make it on YouTube, where they can actually make a living."