I am old enough to remember youtube before monetization, like, comment, and subscribe. It was great. Better than it is now. If others remember the dawn of the Internet, it was a similar feel. People definitely did and still do make videos for free, and actually for free in the sense of the improvement of mankind, not "free" but they are still getting some benefit out of it. If you ask me, those videos are much better than the revenue optimized spam videos made by "content creators".

Wouldn't be sad to see the current ecosystem go. Yes, people would probably start watching more again if they didn't need to wade through ads and pseudo ads.