While I think there is certainly a lot of questionable content because of monetization, some of my favorite YT channels exist because of it. For example, there

While I think there is certainly a lot of questionable content because of monetization, some of my favorite YT channels exist because of it. For example, there's a guy who rebuilt a early-1900's sailing boat from scratch, funded almost entirely by revenue from his channel. The videos are crazy high quality hand-construction porn and would never exist without the monetization aspect. Oh, and I had no prior and no current interest in boat building. Most of the channels I follow (via RSS, rather than YT itself) are like this, and YT generally does an excellent job at putting new channels in front of me from time to time that marry my interests (even one's I didn't know I had) with phenomenally great story telling via video.