I also believe it's entirely possible for someone (it won't be YouTube, they are too invested/tied into their existing model) to successfully integrate manual curation at scale. All you have to do is monetize the curators, and then reverse the traditional ad model being used on the majority of the web. Just like how people are already driven to go and watch live streams from creators who oftentimes simply serve to be a more active, on-screen role of one of these kinds of curators or "coolhunters" or whatever...it's been shown that people are more than willing to donate via superchats or sign up for additional membership features. So what's stopping a platform from doing more targeted audience-specific advertisements?
There are tons of employees at YouTube. A lot of moderators as well. Each one of them could easily discover tons of content within YouTube to publish on personal pick pages on the site. YouTube chooses to only feature a handful of creators at a time because that protects revenue streams, not because content moderation can't scale. People would literally jump to curate content for free on YT as well, as many playlists are made every second by users.
I'd love to see a real honest stat on how views are distributed across YT content, I'm pretty sure the relatively few items featured on their front page and trending/sponsored playlists get the lion share of all views annually, and everything else suffers in silence (relatively).
The only reason algorithms are used is because of engagement.
If people don’t engage then they don’t watch as many ads or they eventually cancel their subscription due to lack of use.
So YouTube uses automation to shove their content down your throat.
That's not to say YouTube's recommendation algorithms are good or that everything needs to be an algorithmic feed.