Because of that, it's probably best not to try and post daily (or multiple times a day) unless you can truly handle it. There's definitely a path to quicker growth if you have a new video going up day in and day out, but that's also often a recipe for burnout in the long run, and the breaks you take to avoid/fix said burnout will be far more damaging than posting once or twice a week would.
Think carefully about the niche you choose to focus on. It should ideally be both something you can get a decent amount of regular content posted about, and something you won't get bored of/burnt out on too quickly. Nothing on YouTube is more difficult than changing your audience when your channel is already established, and I've seen a lot of people's channels crash and burn because of it.
Don't go overboard on shorts unless you want to become a short focused channel. The people who watch those often don't have much patience for longer videos, and probably won't watch your normal content as a result. Focusing too much on these is a good way to get a ton of subs that don't actually care about your work, and to make YouTube think your audience isn't interested in what you're posting.
That's my advice anywhere. As for what my own journey was like?
Honestly, a bit of a mess. On the one hand, my channel has about 33K subscribers right now, and I've had a fair few videos hit the 100K or even 1 million views mark.
On the other hand, I feel I killed a lot of my momentum at various points by not being able to stick to a regular schedule (due to burnout, job and real life needs, etc), and my attempts to try and diversify my content generally haven't done all that well, likely in large part due to focusing too much on a topic where my long term interest was limited.