"but we still can’t give everything away for free.”

Then why have they positioned youtube to be a public worldwide service freely accessible all these years?

It is the usual tactic of operating at a loss for years, building an unsustainable service and supporting it with revenue from other places. Google was officially declared a monopoly, and youtube is not profitable, so it’s easy to connect the dots and say youtube grew to it’s current dominance unfairly through that monopoly money.

Now they want to enforce their TOS on you, pay up or watch a million ads or leave. Well fuck their TOS, I avoid anything google like the plague, but their unfair position on video sharing makes it hard to avoid youtube particularly. I respond unfairly in turn, by proxying youtube through invidious.