I don't necessarily think that's true anymore. YouTube comments are important to the algorithm so creators are more and more active in the comment section, and

I don't necessarily think that's true anymore. YouTube comments are important to the algorithm so creators are more and more active in the comment section, and the comments in general have been a lot more alive and often add a lot of context or info for some type of videos. YouTube has also started giving the comments a lot more visibility in the layout (more than say, the video description). But you're probably right w.r.t platforms like TVs. Before this wave of insane bot spam, the comments had started to be so much better than what they used to be (low effort, boomer spam). In fact I think they were much better than the absolute cringy mess that comments on dedicated forums like Reddit turned into