Every few years a new image host pops up since the incumbents are getting so terrible, they promise the world and get popular until one day they need to start paying for the service and introduce ads, then they stop hotlinking, offer pro accounts, and need to manage takedowns and illegal content.
Soon they look the same as the service they were meant to replace. And then like clockwork, someone comes along who thinks they can do it better, and it all starts over.
I can easily see this playing out with video, but much slower due to everything being bigger, and due to the network effects that at least YouTube currently has.
It's worse than that. What you've listed is what the viewers want.
What the content creators want is all of the above, but to also get paid money, and to receive free marketing for their content.
Search on the other hand is high IOPs.
As you scale out your HDD storage fleet its great to have the benefit of putting a Low IOPs high storage with a High IOPs low storage.
Of course monetization by video creators is left to out-of-band mechanisms, such as crowdfunding via the likes of Kickstarter and Patreon.
And of course the focus on video downloads and away from typical VOD streaming might also be described as making the website "not very easy to use", at least compared to YT. But it also functions to align user behavior, e.g. by heavily discouraging the pointless filler and "high production values" (HD, 4K, HDR etc.) that are rampant on YT itself.
People who think that this policy change is going to lead to some kind of exodus to a YouTube competitor are fooling themselves. There's no one else in the game and there never will be; it's economically impossible.