Based on who the complainers I’ve seen are, I’m sure that at the very least youtube threw out some baby with bathwater. But that said, their monetisation has not been successful. They do need to make big, hard changes.

A lot of what monetisation did was encourage spam, or content quality just above the spam threshold. Meanwhile, patreon (though obviously which a much smaller footprint) seems to encourage the kind of content youtube should want to encourage.