Independent creator culture (1980-2000), converted into mass consumer culture (2000-2010), and then back into taxed creator culture within walled ecosystems (2010-2020).
Someone making funny videos on the internet on their free time without any kind of expectation to make money out of it unavoidably produces different results than the same person making semi-professional videos on Youtube and making living out of it. If the latter is an option, why the hell would the said person do the former? But since the latter option exists, it drives all of the creations to more professional, less quirky direction. It's the same effect that causes all the Hollywood films to have pretty much the same story arc and all the big budget games to feel like copies of each other.
If I start a business that makes hosting and sharing videos easier, should I sell it to hobbyists who don't have money, or semi/pros who have lots of money? And how does that affect my feature pipeline and product evolution?
The end result being... hobbyists have minimal, difficult, and (relatively) expensive platforms to enable their work, and semi/pros have well featured and cheap (or free) platforms. And that perpetuates the bifurcation and destruction of pure hobbyists.
It absolutely is. You don't even have to go completely old-school and DIY youtube. There is always a way you can surf the current internet weather conditions to achieve some hybrid stance.
For instance, maybe you put some videos on YouTube, but also have deeper posts for each of those on some personal blog that you host on a server in your garage.
With this approach, you can drive traffic from both directions - People who were browsing your blog and want to watch some embedded YT demo, and YouTubers desperate for hard, written technical documentation on how to do something will have link in the description below.
F.ex. YouTube started in 2005, but from my memory the first years were primarily sharing copyrighted commercial material, before they cracked down on that and leaned into monetizing and taxing organic content