That’s one of the reasons why you get delayed or cancelled, over-budget projects that go nowhere. ( another big one is corruption and general financial shenanigans ).

if you throw a lot of money at a problem/project that doesn’t have reasonable management and competent understanding of where that money could work efficiently then you’re asking for trouble.

Destinating more resources to that quickens and makes better that process, though, incentivating people to work on it and test it.

That is charmingly naive, in my experience.

I’m not saying more money wouldn’t help, I’m saying throwing money at it isn’t generally a stand-alone solution, which is what i think the person you were replying to was trying to say.

Not sure how versed/willing you are to selfhost but I’ve heard good things about tube archivist.

There are also a bunch of ui’s for yt-dlp, though i can’t vouch for quality.

It’s somewhat of a catch, that’s generally how monopolistic moats work but you really shouldn’t be relying on google as a backup service for obscure videos you wish to keep.

I’ve no idea of the amount of lectures, guides, documentaries and other non-entertainment media that is available exclusively on youtube, but again it isn’t an archiving service.

They can, will and have deleted whole channels for various reasons, most of which were bullshit, if you find something you absolutely have to keep, download it.

That being said, the process of downloading, archiving and curating content on anything more than a trivial scale can be much more involved than it seems, especially if you want backups/redundancy.

I’ve never been a big youtube user so my opinion on this is coloured by the fact that i don’t have that much invested in the platform.

Literally any other form of entertainment.

Though the statement was to stop using it, not replace it.