> everything Google does outside of GCP, Maps, Search, and YouTube could evaporate for all I care
Honestly, even YouTube could evaporate and it really wouldn't make a difference. 99.9999% of YouTube is just mindless entertainment, which is 100% fungible with every other form of entertainment. The amount of actually unique, insightful, worthwhile content on YouTube is a rounding error, and will find other places to live.
AFAIK more than 95% of all email traffic is spam. I still consider email an absolutely vital tool, despite the efficiency below a steam engine.
Same with YouTube: the small sliver of content I care about is important enough for me to pay for YouTube premium.
Sometimes people compare something to a gold mine, to emphasize how rich that is. A typical gold mine extracts several grams of good per tonne of rock, that is, a few parts per million.
Don't cry about the Sturgeon's law; embrace it and celebrate what you can extract.
YouTube isn't analogous to email, it's analogous to Gmail. We were hosting video in the 90s, and the cost of storage, bandwidth, and compute have become orders of magnitude cheaper since then. Video hosting is not magic that only YouTube can pull off.
If the useful YouTube content scattered to multiple alternatives, it would immediately become far less useful. Discovery is a big part of YouTube’s value proposition for me.
Honestly, even YouTube could evaporate and it really wouldn't make a difference. 99.9999% of YouTube is just mindless entertainment, which is 100% fungible with every other form of entertainment. The amount of actually unique, insightful, worthwhile content on YouTube is a rounding error, and will find other places to live.