Videos can work better for learning visual UI tasks of programming. E.g. learning how to navigate visual IDEs such as Jetbrains, MS Visual Studio, Apple Xcode, Qt Creator, Amazon AWS dashboard, etc.

If the above were all reduced to text-based materials, you'd end up with a bunch of static screen shots which misses the movement of the mouse and the button clicks that showed how the IDE changed from one state to the next.

On the other hand... if you're primarily learning the syntax of a language or studying the Big-O properties of an algorithm, you don't need a talking head on a video to explain it. It's more efficient to just read the text.

Basically, search youtube for some specific topic (eg "MediatR" b/c I'm working in .NET)

Using the relevant results, create a playlist and order it with the shortest videos first, or in numerical order if some are part of a series.

Then, start watching the video's. You'll get some garbage, some useful insights, and some really solid advice. Stop when you've had enough and you're at least in a better place to get on with your own work in that particular topic.

Good youtube videos give you the benefit of some context and opinion around the topic. You can't get that with documentation because it typically takes too much of a "reference" approach that isn't helpful if you're just starting but need to get something done.

Stackoverflow works if you got a specific question and can navigate past the smug a-holes, but it also eschews context and advice though in a different way than reference documentation.

Of course, the best thing you can do is to have a kind mentor that will patiently answer your questions, or better, ask YOU questions to guide your learning. Sadly, that's not always possible.

Codingtrain youtube has some decent series, but I like buying courses on Udemy. They’re usually like $10 since there are always promotions.