You might get a lot of gratification out of avoiding giving Google your data but the reality is most traffic is coming from people who will choose convenience.
I find that I am often looking for information in video form (generally because I am trying to learn how to do some physical skill or to learn about something that is innately movement based such as dance). Although I often use Bing's video search in order to not just get YouTube results, the majority of them end up being on YouTube anyways.
In general I haven't found a good way to search for video content so it seems whether irrelevant whether its on YouTube or not since I cannot find it either way.
Am I misunderstanding you?
Perhaps. As I said, YouTube rules video and video search, there's no point arguing that. It just bothers me that as a consumer I have to go through ads the revenue of which doesn't benefit creators, and that lots of content apart from genuine video stuff such as memes, carpentry/hobby, and dance and niche content as you're saying, could be much better (and with incomparably more effective data use and accessibility) presented on a fsking web page rather than on 1960's linear TV shows with ad interstitials, noisy video suggestions, etc.
This is easiest to check by using the "-site:youtube.com" parameter, but they also show up for certain queries (try "news") or if you scroll far enough down the page.
You’ve clearly never tried to use the reddit search. It is almost guaranteed NOT to give you meaningful results.
The benefit of using a search engine is knowing that it will give you the results you want, and not having to rely upon the sites’ own search implementations.
That obviously does not imply that one needs to use Google specifically, but I commonly will add “reddit” to a search query on any search engine to get the results I’m looking for.
In the end there isn't much new content worth searching
True, and the old content that's actually worth reading seems to be getting more difficult to find.
This is bunk, and it's time for this myth to die. DDG/Bing/Yandex will list the exact same pages that Google gives as a search result most of the time, and sometimes better ones. If you find that the pointless endless-scroll listing of millions of search results (in 0.333ms!) that Google and also DDG gives you isn't helpful, you can also try Startpage.com.
What are you searching for? Programming-related questions? Then go to stackoverflow.com directly (where you'll end up in 99% of cases when you search with DDG or Google anyway on these topics). Tip: to search SO, I've found it works best to create (but not submit) a new question with as much info in the headline as possible; the results that SO brings up to check for duplicate questions are excellent search results (btw have they changed it recently? I don't remember working it as good as it's now). Requires a StackExchange account though.
Are your searching for review of tech gadgets or christmas gifts? Then many people on HN admit to include "reddit" in their search terms. Then why not go directly to reddit.com for your search.
Are you searching on YouTube? Then indeed Google (YouTube itself) works best, but the real solution is to quit your media consumption habbit of spending your waking hours on monopolists video streaming sites that don't benefit creators. For just music without pointless and data-intensive video and ad noise, there are several alternatives.
Maybe it's time for new topic-related meta search engines and link aggregation sites.
In the end there isn't much new content worth searching for, thanks to Google and Facebook extracting almost all (70% in 2018) ad revenue, and the demise of the federated web in favour of 2010's portals such as github. I can assure you that the modest amount of new content worth reading can be easily summarized and searched by basic, non-personalized search algorithms; no ML required.
Going to Google to search things is really asking for the site with the most ads and trackers on them, is something that no self-respecting "Hacker" should be doing, and is a habbit you can quit at the turn of the decade if you haven't already. Because it's literally equivalent to asking "Ok Google, fill my feeble mind with shit".