Quite a few leading questions there! I'm sure you have probably touched a nerve for us all at one point or another but why not go easy on the attack and dive in with some empathy? Or why not play silly buggers with randomish thoughts:

Perhaps we could come up with a trail of breadcrumbs that touches on decent YT vids. By leaving carefully coded comments. warms to idea That would leave the trail in YT itself which would self heal if multiply pointered properly, ie each point has a link forwards, backwards and to, perhaps a hub to use in the event of a bigger outage.

The above might be far more fun to deploy than a search engine or an old school WAIS/Gopher. After a while the host would cotton on and decide to either encourage or thwart. Game on!

sips more wine OK so who fancies playing stenography style games with YT comments to generate guided courses using YT vids?

I enjoy these sort of channels, but I would say I ever "learn" anything from them.

I watched hours of gardening and cooking videos on YouTube yesterday and learned a lot of useful information. Unfortunately that probably won't help me with my next job interview :(

I recently heard the advice to do some forensics on yourself -- bookmarks, search history, youtube history, to figure out what kind of person you are (in the context of what work would suit you best).