I was surprised at how little I actually cared about the reddit communities I was subscribed to. I switched to Lemmy on 6/12 and just never thought about reddit again. I use a couple RSS feeds to get the same news now (which is a better idea anyway), and Lemmy has enough people in the topics I'm actually interested in so I don't feel like I'm missing any important discussion.

I suspect it will be the same story with Youtube for me. I really don't need to be watching Youtube 95% of the time. I tune in to videos because it's convenient. If Google is going to make it inconvenient, the value proposition changes and I'd rather do something else to fill my time. I wonder if there will be backlash from creators now that many users are inherently disincentivized from visiting Youtube...