Ironically enough, sponsored content quite cleanly omits all this complexity and lets content makers earn money.
The alternative (for instance) would be an automatic system distributing the $$ I pay YT among the creators I watch. That's significantly less complexity for the end-user and the content creator.
So youtube red instead? They split the creator portion of your subscription between the creators you watch (assuming they've setup the ability to get paid by YT). Worth quite a bit more than ad views too, last I heard.