> So long as storage costs decrease exponentially I think they'll keep everything.

I agree. That's why I've recently made a practice of backing up things to which I'd regret permanently losing access.

https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/historical-cost-of-comput...

Relatively recently they updated their policy. If you don't login to your account for two years they will delete everything. Source: https://support.google.com/accounts/answer/12418290?hl=en

I have two accounts from my youth with mostly fansubs and "funny" vids. (A "Everybody Draw Mohammed Day"-Video that, 11 years after its upload, got band in Pakistan.) It includes two very successful (over 1M views combined) uploads of political TV shows. I will not log in to this this accounts. So this stuff will get deleted. So in the long run, stuff will disappear from YT.

I believe YouTube content was explicitly exempted from that deletion.

You seem to be right. This Google Blog post[1] says "we do not have plans to delete accounts with YouTube videos at this time."

[1] https://blog.google/technology/safety-security/updating-our-...

Would be nice if they would write that into the actual policy and don't just add a random sentence to a blog post.

If I remember right the original policy was to delete the YouTube videos and after pushback the YouTube exception was added.