Crappy Design

Who is going to be competing for the eyeballs of people who militantly refuse to watch ads? I'd love to see YouTube have competition, but I don't think the demographic here is particularly valuable to anyone.

Yeah, I feel like this is all very cyclical.

The status quo is acceptable so people use it. It works well enough and it's practical enough that the majority of the user base sticks with a given standard, which creates momentum/inertia: the more accepted a given platform becomes the more content creators cater to it, which in turn draws and keeps more traffic.

Owners of the platform see this and monetize. It's not bad at first but eventually greed gets the better of everyone, and they keep pushing and squeezing, usually both the base and the creators, for the privilege of playing in their playground, the defacto "place to be"... without consideration of the fact that their playground only holds that status because of the very people they're squeezing.

Eventually they push it too far, and people start to jump ship as the enshittification finally tips their scales away from the status quo and makes finding an alternative the more attractive choice, even if it means giving up the positive aspects of the established platform.

Sometimes it can take a while but eventually one or more new platforms emerge as the new "place to be" and the cycle begins again.

Unfortunately, rather than learning from past mistakes and simply being less greedy and understanding that they need to find ways of generating profit that doesn't alienate their creators and viewers, instead the lesson learned seems to be 'try to find ways to trap users in your system so they can't leave'...which never is going to work.