I agree that YouTube - like most large social networks - cares only about the large traffic generators, but I'm not sure about your characterization of the content.

I can find high quality creators for almost anything on earth that interests me - programming, ML, music creation, woodworking, and so on.

I suspect this is all about the deprioritization of the little guy.

Google also shuts the door quickly and hard. My personal adsense account was permabannned years ago and 1) I don't know why 2) there appears no avenue to address it