For me the reason is not supporting YT censorship. Not just the random strikes on accounts, or video de-monetization, but doing things like removing the dislike

For me the reason is not supporting YT censorship. Not just the random strikes on accounts, or video de-monetization, but doing things like removing the dislike button, and poking people about “misinformation”. It used to be you could see the ratio of likes to dislikes on videos, but they forcefully removed that from all videos. YT claimed it was to prevent bullying, but it was always possible to disable likes on your own videos. I think the real reason was: All the major news networks had extreme dislike ratios on their videos, and they wanted to promote that over alt sources of information. With regards to being compensated, if I want to support a creator, I will just donate to them. Many creators ended up using Patreon due to de-monetization.