What has happened to Youtube?

I'd say YouTube has been pretty unfavourable towards their creators since the mid or maybe early 2010s.  I am always hearing stories of people who are fans of some channel who come across a new video by chance or by manually looking the channel up because YouTube has taken it upon themselves to unsubscribe them.  Then there are people who put up a video, it get views but at some point the view counter freezes for a while, preventing the video from really taking off.  And controversial topics get Wikipedia 'facts' posted beneath them, as if to say 'careful you don't believe something that goes against our narrative'.  YouTube have been screwing with people for ages.

I also recently heard a story of someone / some people who wrongfully claimed copyright on some music and even set up bank accounts and so on to receive royalties from YouTube!  So they were getting paid for music they didn't own!  They eventually got caught, but it does seem like YT sides with copyright claimants without much pushback to check said claims are true.

As a user there is an RSS feed you can use to subscribe without the need to create an account or worry about getting un-sub'd.  If you right click on a channel's home page, view page source then use Ctrl + F (or Cmd + F) and find "rss".  There's an RSS feed link in the page source!

Have you ever used Invidious?