I wonder why you are downvoted. I have no skin in talking about your second part (other channels + breakdown of MrBeast money), but I sympathize with your first part.

Optimizing for monetization seems to degrade quality most of the time. E.g. click bait video names/thumbnails that do not tell the viewer what they are about to watch. Or reducing the feature set of apps so no casual user is confused, but advanced users are left behind. Or stretching video lengths to improve ad income without actually adding any valuable content. ...