> Must I buy the product at Costco after I’ve tasted the sample or am I just a freeloader?
No, because the owner of that property has set terms allowing that. Try to eat a dozen samples, though, and they’ll probably ask you to leave.
This isn’t actually a complicated concept: their property, their rules. If you don’t like YouTube, that’s totally reasonable – I don’t – but no amount of sophistry will create a right for you to use their private property on your terms. Just go somewhere else: there are tons of creators who’d love a better deal than Google/Facebook offer them but that’s never going to happen as long as people insist on paying them through YouTube.