Let’s not forget the unmentioned income thanks to gathering all that user data.
The real value of Youtube (and social medias in general) is not the raw revenue they generate.
It’s being able to be able to predict what will trend in advance to sell ads to anyone, anywhere. Which is proven by their 200+ billions in revenue from ads from all services.
It’s extremely likely that in an alternate universe where Google doesn’t own YouTube, their profit today is lower than what they currently have.
But like you said, poor YouTube is not making money explicitly on its own so they’ll use it to justify any cost increase attempt when they already know what the real money maker is.
I just accept our fate.
Humanity will probably realize we seriously fucked up around 2050 and near the end of the century mass migration will lead to a death count much bigger than WW2 or the chinese civil wars.
The only grace is that most of us reading this thread will die from various reason before the second stage.
I will still do my part by reducing my CO2 print but unless we find some miracle technology, shitty world leaders and corporations will ruin everything for fake wealth.