I feel like there needs to be a peered youtube client. As people watching youtube download the videos and later share it with other people who want to watch it. YT will have a much harder time differentiating and actually, it might even help them with bandwidth.
If this were done with IPFS, there would also automatically be backups of the videos, which maybe The Internet Archive (and other archivers) would be happy about.
i believe to some degree, that this is what that one youtube alternative did.
Although you could pretty easily implement this into youtube. Would be pretty cool if it was very minimal on the backend, such that people like me could also get involved. I archive yt manually, have TBs of it. Provided read access only to it and having it integrate into a global frontend would be pretty cool.
it's not that bad honestly, it allows you to curate everything to whatever needs you have, plus writing a script to automatically archive the more regular shit makes it a lot easier.
Though yeah, you can just use something like tubearchivist.