One of my videos was very different than all my others and it did, for me, very well. This video earned something like 700k views compared to my average of high hundreds to low thousands.
Like this author, my video was something different than I usually did. Unlike this author my thought was "I've got to start making more content like that new thing!"
However, my approach kind of killed my channel. The reason my video did well turned out to be because a minor YouTuber (significantly more major than me) linked to it and almost all of the views came from him. He never linked to my other videos so when I made similar content it didn't do very well.
When I went back to making my old content that did worse than before too. My mental model was that I had alienated my original audience with the shift to the new kind of videos and then alienated my new audience with the return to the old kind of videos.
In the end, I felt that the random spike in views, and my poor handling of it, ruined my channel and reversed the modest momentum I had built over years. I used to have small but growing numbers of views and subscribers. After this incident I had declining numbers of both.