The problem here is that people make videos for money.

If you make videos for money you are highly interested in following googles rules, no matter how insane they get.

Maybe don’t make a career out of videos? If everyone just stopped doing that, Google would have a lot less muscle when telling people what they could do in their videos.

Life pro tip: never do things solely for money.

People seem to get mad when I say that but they also seem to misunderstand what I mean when I say “solely for money”. If you have a job that pays the bills, don’t make YouTube videos solely because you will have more money. Doing so will put you in Googles mercy, and you will be scared to death to do anything that removes that income. Instead, make videos to help your career, or simply for fun, and don’t monetize them. Google can’t threaten your income if you don’t get income from them.

From what i've heard from creators youtube ads are such a small fraction of revenue that they don't count it - maybe horrible clickbait content mills depend on it but world would be better off without them.

Mostly it comes from patreon or equivalent, sponsorship deals and merch sales.

Youtube exists only because discoverability, and ads profit goes mostly to YT itself.