I'd pay for YouTube if it curated its content to skip all the clickbait, engagement garbage, AI-generated channels, scam videos and so on, which make this unbearable to use.

Even if you remove the ads, it's WORK to find quality content on YouTube these days, and this happens to a large degree because they incentivize their content providers to trick the algorithm and users into watching garbage for money. We saw the same happen with Twitter in real time when they announced revenue sharing.

YouTube is more broken today than it ever was. I don't know the exact recipe for fixing this, but this ain't it. I'm not paying to support this cesspool.