Googling a little, I might be misremembering limitations from a long time ago or from older IRC versions or something. Does it have async multi user rooms, reactions, and is it federated so I can stick to one log in? Not trying to be adversarial at all, these are just what I would miss if I didn’t use matrix and I haven’t really looked at xmpp since AIM days lol.
Why xmpp over matrix? Seems generally like older tech that doesn’t have modern chat features.
Does youtube even work with NoScript? I would assume that google has 50 different scrips running that break the site if they aren’t allowed
PeerTube is a thing, though it seriously lacks content. It uses WebTorrent, so similar to how more popular torrents end up being faster rather than more taxed, wider use could lead to better stream stability. It’s hard to compete with literally the largest video platform in the world, but there is a world were the tech could give a solid alternative community similar to mastodon or lemmy.
I don’t really know how much youtube ad-sense really pays out. It seems like for a lot of mid tier content the value is in driving folks to patreon. Even for the big channels the real money is in merch and other monetization methods. The problem is there is just such a smaller audience on peertube it’s doesn’t give the reach to find an audience worth monetizing.
It could be their goal is not to be folks primary casual browsing instance, so just being someone that is stopping in to hang out isn’t quite what they are looking for.