My opinion is content creators could host their own content and then links to these could be aggregated on sites like lemmy/reddit/twitter/etc for the purpose of discovery. This way one site doesn’t get to control the narrative by manipulating what videos people see and creators can monetize their content however they like.

People are free to do this. It turns out hosting video content is expensive. Most YouTubers aren’t exactly rolling in cash. The ones everyone knows, sure, they’re making a living from it now. But that also wouldn’t have been possible for most of them starting out.

Like it or not, YouTube provides something important to the internet: a place for content creators to get started with comparatively little upfront cost.