I changed to kagi 3 months ago and first was weird paying for a search engine but now it makes complete sense. Love being a customer and not a product!
Every box of sweets in Japan are like that. There's an outer layer of plastic, an inner layer and every sweet is individually packaged. It feels so wasteful.
There's a reason why they are the only ones. It's very hard to scale a platform to YouTube scale. Like insanely hard and very expensive. The only other players that could take over are Meta and maybe Microsoft. Not sure if they would be any better.
If no one pays for YouTube how can they keep supporting their insanely costly infrastructure? Hosting all those videos is not free. Far from it.
I'm perfectly fine paying for YouTube if that means I can continue to have access to awesome creators under a easy to use platform. It would be a very sad day if Google decided to shut down YouTube due to not being able to cover it's costs.
The only other company that could potentially take over would be meta. Which would probably be even worse. At least YouTube provides an option to pay to disable ads.