This is a problem with a lot of YouTube videos. They tend to only show the “happy path” of things working and make it look effortless to do very difficult things.
It’s very easy to go watch someone very experienced and practiced do something and think “looks pretty easy. I could do that…”
It's also difficult to ask questions to a YouTube video. Even on a forum like Reddit where you might get a good answer, you'll get 10 of them, compared to a person you trust giving you one.
People who watch a lot of youtube will start to feel like making youtube videos is a very common thing for average people to do. They won't realize that it takes an unusually large amount of resources and lifestyle changes to have a successful channel.
YouTube has plenty of crap, especially autogenerated crap, but it's still much more difficult to produce a video that's going to hit all the right SEO buttons than to do the same with text on the web.
I think every home/car repair that I did in the last year I learned by watching a youtube video. I would argue that not using youtube is actually very very difficult in 2021
Just try it. With this age of Youtube, the barrier to entry is extremely low. You don't need a full shop of tools, just patience and the willingness to learn.
The rise of YouTube has certainly resulted in some simpler content becoming less usable. While installing a new thermostat, I googled "4 wire thermostat colors" a while back and got an onslaught of videos that were each several minutes in length. It's literally 4 pieces of information, that's it. It's made worse by Google promoting YouTube results, since it probably drives more ad revenue.
On the other end of the spectrum, when I look for information about how to assemble a transmission (or similar) I instead find someone who has cut together some short video that doesn't actually contain good shots of the various assembly steps.
Youtube is pushing Tik Tok style "shorts" pretty hard. If you ever accidently click on one, the UI makes it very hard to find your way back, and easy just to sit and watch a bunch of 15-second clips.
Even the long-form content is a minefield. The line between educational, informative long-form content (Clickspring, Tech Ingredients, Ox Tools, Matthias Wendel, Alan Millyard, etc) and "lifestyle entertainment" (Matt Armstrong, Cleetus McFarland, Matt's Offroad Recovery, etc) is surprisingly fine (AvE, Tavarish, Rainman Ray, etc), and you might not notice you've crossed it until too late.
Don't even get me started on the videos that contain a vital piece of information that could be written in one paragraph, but spread it over 10 minutes. A lot like the online recipe site disasters.
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