I think persuading people to self-host is probably a lost cause, you're essentially asking people to pay to put their videos somewhere that nobody's going to see them. If we want to replace YouTube with something less obnoxious (a worthy goal IMO) we have to solve the problem of actually getting an audience for the people putting out the videos to begin with.
Perhaps a balanced approach would be to have a Youtube channel that 100% complies with their algorithms Im half kidding, nobody really know what this is and then your own CDN distributed videos. Mention towards the end of your videos where to find more detailed content and avoid words like uncensored, raw uncut as I am sure the YTBots will see that as evasion. I see some of the more popular youtubers doing this and it appears to be working for them. They still get monetization, audience and ad-revenue leaving their uncensored discussions elsewhere so that YTBots need not concern themselves.
Because YouTube provides a lot more than a video hosting service? Discoverability being the main one. Finding an audience isn't trivial.
You don't exactly need HTML to serve a video file.
rsync was invented 25 years ago, why would anyone use Dropbox?