You absolutely can blame YouTube for encouraging content creators to go "all in". They are absolutely aware of this and the design of YouTube highly emphasises

You absolutely can blame YouTube for encouraging content creators to go "all in". They are absolutely aware of this and the design of YouTube highly emphasises these metrics (which in turn translate to financial success). They allowed the formation of networks (few successful channels are "independent", finding a network is usually one of the first steps creators take when seeking to become "professional"). Their promos (e.g. Rewind) routinely feature content with high production values that are only possible with financial investment and they actively promote the idea of having YouTube "celebrities" (although lately there has been a shift towards "importing" TV personalities). What YouTube did was create a culture around their platform that encourages people to go full time and earn money by producing content for YouTube for free and get a cut of the ad revenue in return. In order to fight creators who gamed the system they then went and created an air of mystery around what content they actively promote (just listen to YouTubers talk about "the algorithm"), leading to various superstitions and conspiracy theories while intentionally driving creators to change the kind of content they create in order to adapt. Then they pulled the rug underneath creators by secretly demonetising videos, resulting in revenue to drop for seemingly no reason until they made the monetisation status more visible (which sparked the "adpocalypse" drama). At that point many creators diversified their income via patreon but this relied on viewers to actually part with their money, which only worked for channels with very dedicated fans or a consistent level of quality (further adding to the pressure to churn out new content and reach a wider audience). Meanwhile YouTube has been abandoning the independent creators that drove the site's initial success in favor of big name production studios moving content from TV over to YouTube or creating tie-ins. The independent creators that still do well are mostly the ones heavily relying on clickbait to drive fews and churning out short and shallow content that allows them to feed the algorithm and stay relevant (although even these now often rely on product placement and sponsorship deals). On the one hand this is a classical story of a startup pivoting as it adapts to market changes and hits problems of scale. On the other hand there is a massive social cost YouTube is all but neglecting to take responsibility for. YouTube doesn't care how their changes affect the livelihoods of creators. Free market libertarians will say they shouldn't have to care about this and they are absolutely right legally speaking. But let's not pretend the effects those decisions have on real people's lives weren't predictable. There's the old Web 2.0 joke that "there's nothing social about social media" but YouTube certainly lives up to that. Note that all of this wouldn't be half as bad if YouTube were at all approachable to its creators. Instead, by using an unpredictable "algorithm" to hand out punishments (demonetisation, content claims, strikes) and rewards ("trending", "watch next", etc), YouTube creates a victim mindset which naturally breeds resentment. EDIT: If anything, YouTube is a high-risk high-reward precursor to other "sharing economy" companies like Uber, except Uber's playing field is much more level.