I don't believe subscriptions will be going away anytime soon. Creators still like the sub count even though it is pretty meaningless these days and YT themselv

I don't believe subscriptions will be going away anytime soon. Creators still like the sub count even though it is pretty meaningless these days and YT themselves seem to have a love/hate relationship with it, while on one hand they want to do away with subscriptions, but on the other hand they still use the metric for things like being able to monetize content, access to features/services and they add things to the creator dashboard telling creators the percentage of viewer who are subed/unsubed and recently disabled to ability to hide your sub count from the public. And as you said there are viewers who exclusive use the subscriptions page, I used to be the same and had my default youtube "landing page" as the subs page. But YT changed something and broke that and before I could be bothered to fix it I found that I was enjoying atleast some of the content the algo was recommending to me so started using it more and more, and before I knew it I stopped using the subscriptions page entirely. So while they wish they could turn subscriptions off, I think they know it would cause too much backlash and would still have to still have to add a way for viewers to follow creators they want but make it more meaningful. I'm currently subscribed to over 500 channels but a lot of those channels could be removed from my list because it contains channels I no longer watch (be it because my tastes changed, the channels content changed, the channels are dead/retired) but I cba to go though the list and unsub. At which point a viewers sub list is just adding noise and delieverying (atleast some) content the viewer doesn't actually want to watch.