Everything has a lifespan, YouTube remaining free is probably in the middle of its lifespan by my guess.
The cat and mouse game will go on for a bit before YouTube asks for donations, then starts requiring paid memberships across the board. Nobody wants to pirate a few dozen 30 second videos of cats, and that's when YouTube's competition will rise.
As YouTube dies, new things will pop up to fill the niche. Most of us are hoping that new thing comes sooner rather than later. One day Peertube, Odyssey, and Grayjay will be better competition than little old YouTube.
You asked this on Lemmy, which is a niche being filled in by the enshitification of Reddit. You're part of the progress away from pdependency on the big few corporate sites. That's a bigger deal than most people know.
I'd swap some of the first clay documents around until I ended up with a timeline where we live modern life with a gift economy rather than a money economy. We'd all have a lot more options to pay off our debt rather than the streamlined ridgid money system.