This is entirely anecdotal, but reading the comments here it feels like compensation for the bottom 50% of creators has gone down in the last 5-ish years

I ran a Minecraft YouTube channel in high school in 2014 (I thought I was too late to get big on YouTube and shut it down in 2016!) and made $500 a month with 2,500 subscribers. I happened to have one video that got a few hundred thousand views, which helped