PeerTube has livestreams, and they're even P2P load-balanced; this reduces the cost quite a bit.

I think it's a chicken-egg question.Live streaming is expensive, indeed, but we can do more to send people to alternative platforms to create content.Platforms will generally expand their 'free' plans once they amass users and become more serious.I think rumble has streaming for sure, not sure if free, but at this point at least the web experience is decent for youtube alternatives.The mobile experience through apps isn't there yet[though the web experience on mobile isn't terrible], but some promising ones are to be seen on stores like F-Droid.