> requires a huge amount of skill and patience, not to mention risk tolerance.
making a good YouTube channel also requires those, and there's no financial incentive to small/beginner creators which are investing their time
If your YouTube channel doesn't take off, you've only lost the time invested.
If you misconfigure your server and it loses data or is hacked, it might seriously disrupt your personal life. (Imagine someone taking over your email server and stealing your identity.)
Most people who upload videos to youtube are going to have less than ten views total on those videos, which is fine, because why should they maximize views on a crappy phone video of their cat or something? Likewise, you can run lighttpd with little to no configuration in order to make some directory available, & nobody's likely to attack it even if it happens to be vulnerable, simply because most people are not hosting anything valuable enough to be worth exploiting.
The ideas we have of running a youtube channel or running a server are both affected by the hypervisible minority of highly polished professional versions: when we think of youtube videos, we're more likely to think of Hank Green than x_greenfan77_x, and when we think of web services, we're more likely to think of Facebook than we are to think of that python script we dashed off in ten minutes that's been working unobtrusively for eight years. The difference is that running a server has a mostly unearned reputation for a higher minimum technical skill involved: everybody knows that you can record a youtube video with no makeup & shitty lighting and sound, because everybody has seen amateur youtube videos, but not everybody knows that their torrent client is a server.
I run my own servers, and my wife is a professional makeup artist.
The amount of time, energy, and effort she puts into just ONE single Instagram post is more than I put into any of my servers.
It took both of us years of learning to do both these things we do, and honestly I get that you picked makeup as some kind of example because you think that makeup is easy or something.
But it's not.
Instagram, or YouTube takes a lot of skill, skills in recording video, camera, marketing, lighting, these aren't makeup skills, these are skills on top of makeup..
Then there's the outlay for recording and lighting equipment. Tripods to hold the camera, microphones for good audio.
If you don't have these things your video will look like crap and people will click off it.
Then there's the thumbnail! That's a whole thing on its own.
YouTube or Instagram is just as labour and startup cost intensive as running a server.
I'd even argue that servers are not as expensive. Have you seen how much money a good makeup kit costs? You can repurpose an old laptop or whatever as a server, or a raspberry pi... That's far cheaper than brushes for instance.
I think the parent picked makeup, not because they think it's easy, but it's a wildly different domain than system administration. Someone with a talent for makeup combined with a talent (or dogged determination) for creating mechanically good Instagram videos does not necessarily have a talent for system administration.
Even some sort of makeup-Instagram-sysadmin polymath doesn't necessarily have the time to put into each of those topics to actually make a video people want to watch, serve it well enough that a majority of the population can watch it no matter their device, and even get people to their server to even view the content. At some point you must have noticed the credits at the end of a TV show or movie. More than one person is often involved in the production so each one can focus on a particular task or even subtasks. You know, division of labor.
There's also the missing detail of no matter how good or a bad a makeup artist or Instagram video creator you are your makeup can't become a member of a malicious botnet or lock your home network down with ransomware if you do something wrong or leave it unattended for a weekend.
The "run your own server" meme essentially requires everyone interested in content creation of any sort to be independently wealthy polymaths with no outside responsibilities.