That being said, I think a more scalable and better solution is more-so the "lean middleman" model (ie Itch-like). The problem with YouTube and Twitch isn't the core of their position in this system; the problem is that they're too big. They have thousands of employees, they're hosted on big cloud providers, and they're accountable to profit-seeking mega-corps; all of these things drive the revenue that creators see down, and the argument that they're fundamentally necessary in a system like this is tenuous.

Content moderation is definitely the hardest problem to solve at their scale, and its a strong argument for why they have to be so big. I think this is something that needs to be solved in two ways: first, by lowering the number of rules which need to be enforced (ie nudity? maybe that's ok, as long as the channel is properly age-gated and the age of the streamer is confirmed), and second, by increasing the bar to even getting a platform in the first place (ie it should take a week or so, manual approval of recognition of the rules, and some fee that the content producer actually has to pay which supports the platform and increases investment).

Big Tech is insanely conservative when it comes to any changes that would either hurt their sign-up metrics or hurt their ability to sell advertisements. This is where new platforms need to focus, because Big Tech fundamentally and intrinsically cannot compete against you there. What options open up when you throw out the idea that you need to sell advertisements, and you throw out the idea that "growth at any cost" is the goal (big tech loves that for the growth part; no one pays attention to the "any cost" part).