I'm inclined to agree. The whole internet discussion about this topic and even "eshitification" has boiled down to "I want it for free and I don't want to pay."
Meanwhile users are happy to jump to the next free thing starting the whole cycle again, until it wants to get paid for.
The web kinda stinks in ways, but users don't want to pay either... so want ends up being the product?
That's a very slanted and bad faith interpretation of the discussion.
Enshittification is about companies running all other competition out of the market with their free service, then once they've secured their near monopoly, they clamp down with increasingly user hostile changes and act like it's unreasonable that people don't want to pay for the product whose "selling" point was that it was effectively free.
This argument is even more stark when considering that YouTube has just been burning goodwill from everyone and coasting on its weight for many years now.
The success of Patreon style models is also a pretty clear indicator that people are willing to pay for things they like as long as they aren't being dragged through a bait-and-switch.
Enshittification is a term and it gets thrown about like crazy these days / it's losing meaning as quickly as it came about. I'm seeing it all over this story.
The patreon model has a lot of limits that would make it unusable for something like Youtube / creators who don't gather a regular large audience and so on. I think the people who give via a patreon model is a very very small % of the userbase too.
The patreon model works pretty well for creators, far more reliable than YouTube ads since it provides a stable income with the ability for the creator to control expectations.
YouTube ads are not a sustainable source of income, as YouTube can demonetize or allow a copyright claim to steal away the fruits of your labor with no meaningful recourse. On top of that, ad revenue largely relies on a constant stream of uploads which favor the whims the current iteration of the recommendation algorithm.
As for being a means of funding a video host, sure, a patreon style model might not be sustainable, but the point was that people are willing to pay for a service if the payment is earned rather than coerced through bait and switch tactics.
Put differently, at this point I will insist on consuming YouTube without paying for it and without watching ads in any way possible. If a similar service (but paid) were to pop up where the creators I'm interested in were to move to, I'd happily move over, just as I switched to Kagi as soon as I confirmed that it was good enough for my purposes.
Meanwhile users are happy to jump to the next free thing starting the whole cycle again, until it wants to get paid for.
The web kinda stinks in ways, but users don't want to pay either... so want ends up being the product?