I agree with you on pretty much all your points here, I just think that for the kind of slice of life content that this “video essay” has an audience for, there just isn’t a similar audience for if it were a blog post. I guess the shift to a semi-professional approach to content creation of this sort is driven by content creators going where the audience is, which is overwhelmingly on the side of video. It’s just easier to build an audience on YouTube and support that with Patreon I suppose.

I think the kind of content you’re looking for is probably on Substack and its competitors, but the major benefit to consumers and competitive advantage of YouTube is the recommendation algorithm and built-in user base of people with a Google/ YouTube account.