This holds true for all kind of content (YouTube, Courses, StackOverflow, Reddit, HackerNews) where a person has no ownership or no monetary interest (or doesn't worship pure altruism) ... At least content creators are urged to keep their content up-to-date, otherwise they would receive bad feedback (and bad SEO scores over time if people don't stay on your website). I could name you lots of articles I have kept up-to-date over the last 3 years (more than I wrote for sure), and I know this doesn't apply to all content creators, but I can tell you that it really matters for your readers and your credibility.

For sure, the easiest thing as a content creator is publishing (almost) ever green content (see web applications article). However, most often you are looking for topics that solve actual problems of your readers (see react testing library article) which often leads to bleeding edge technology which isn't document well yet.

For what it's worth, there will always be companies with money who pay people to write content to support their products (e.g. SaaS). This makes it harder every day for individuals like me to sustain their livelihoods. However, I strongly believe in the long run quality trumps quantity.

In a perfect world, there would be (1) one perfect learning material (e.g. official documentation) and (2) one unified learning style (e.g. text, video, both) for all students. But we are not living in a perfect world and therefore people look for resources outside of the box.

Is it intent? Authors write how-to books to make sales, not to pass on information for the good of humanity. Does that mean that all technical works are barely-disguised spam?

I'll grant that they probably do like the idea of passing on what they know, but I very much suspect the same thing of the tech lead who was asked to write a blog post by their marketer.

Alright, then we can all stop writing articles and making YouTube videos.

Let's only allow some starving hippies to create content as of now.