> I'd never pay a dime for YT itself due to their policies and overall platform.
You're supporting them just by using them, whether they are showing you ads or tracking you or not. You're reducing demand on other platforms for this content because you're letting YouTube provide it for you. If you really want to stand against YouTube, don't use it. Otherwise, you're still supporting their platform, you've just decided to do so in a way that saves you time, money and convenience at the expense of YouTube and the content creators on YouTube.
If you're going to do it, you might as well own it.
You're absolutely right of course. But it's still a chicken-and-egg problem. YT is frequently the only platform where content creators publish because of network effects.
I guess it's too easy for me to continue using YT for discovery.
Yep, and it's those network effects which are strengthened through using YouTube even if they aren't making revenue from ads through you.
It's similar to disliking Walmart and Amazon but still using them because they are cheap, convenient, a known factor, etc, which many do (including me, in the case of Amazon). The first step is acknowledging the trade-off you're making and being aware of it. At least then people are making a conscious choice, so if they want to re-evaluate at some point, they can do so with better facts.
You're supporting them just by using them, whether they are showing you ads or tracking you or not. You're reducing demand on other platforms for this content because you're letting YouTube provide it for you. If you really want to stand against YouTube, don't use it. Otherwise, you're still supporting their platform, you've just decided to do so in a way that saves you time, money and convenience at the expense of YouTube and the content creators on YouTube.
If you're going to do it, you might as well own it.