Youtube also faces a big challenge with incentives IMO. Obviously discoverability of videos matter. But depending on how the decision to feature a video is made, Youtube can (and has) incentivized content creators to change their content to fit that box. It's the reason why most videos in my front page are click bait, with really obnoxious thumbnails, and a lot of times with all caps titles.

Here's a video by a youtuber about all this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bm-Jjvqu3U4

I believe the idea of moving towards a more AI/ML based recommendation system is interesting because it frees Youtube from the burden of defining what is worthy of being featured (and featuring everything that's relevant to each particular user). In a way it could democratize content discovery. But I don't see it working as well as it could be.

I have a feeling that Youtube may want to be able to promote certain youtube "stars" because, let's be real, they are the ones driving revenue. But I chose to believe a world where content discovery is more fair is possible.

I will say that this has less to do with the shitty way subscription works nowadays. The idea behind that is: if users want to follow certain creators, they should be able to. Moving that towards a AI/ML system seems just inefficient at achieving that goal. I don't know the rationale behind the decision here.