Fair, late-stage capitalism points. Of the two excellent channels I mentioned, I believe one monetizes by YT, and one by Patreon, but I think the latter method is indeed more popular now, perhaps for the reasons you mentioned.
Everyone should have left, yes, but considering how enormous YT’s storage and bandwidth is, I’m not sure how realistic that would have been in terms of single platform. Something like Daily Motion is a nice YT alt, but it probably would have been brought to its knees trying to serve all YT’s content. And/or simply bought out once again by Google or an even worse company, like Yahoo.