I don't think you understand the amount of money we're talking about here. There are YouTube channels that started as side projects that have grown in to multi-million dollar profit businesses. Keeping that as a side project because "views count is a bad business model" would be completely crazy.
Relying on YouTube is no different to relying on Google, or Amazon, or any service that people build successful businesses on. Yes, there's a risk having a single critical factor, but that doesn't automatically mean the risk is too great to still be worthwhile.
The real problem here is that YouTube has an effective monopoly as the only working platform for monetized online video. If that's the business you're in then you have to use YouTube.