The problem is that the old way is dead. And its own popularity killed it. Just for example; There is no way a video hosting site the size and scope of YouTube could have possibly existed when the Internet was a hobby.
What do we do with that?
So many sites just cramming ads into every single square inch of their sites ruins it for almost everyone else. I get a visceral reaction to banner ads now.
I totally understand the economics of it, and the fact that you can't bootstrap something like Youtube by charging for it, but that's just how it is. It's a shame that the responsible sites are getting painted with the same brush, but so much of the internet has gotten so insanely greedy with ads that there's just no other choice.
B. Because I get that the cost to deliver me a 30 minute video is fairly expensive even for Google. Most text websites, the cost in bandwidth to deliver the ads is orders of magnitude more than the site itself. I host text based websites and they cost literally a dollar a month. The overhead of my single visit to a text/image site is a tiny fraction of the cost of me watching even a 5 minute YT video.
If you build a blog or generally text-first site in a sensible way, the cost of a single visitor is ~free. Making me see and load 4-5 ads at any time is just abusive. As was said elsewhere, if you think your content is good enough to cost money, then try charging for it, but there really just aren't that many people talented enough to successfully demand living income for writing or recipes or other mundane stuff people put on the internet.
We could wish for a world where it's easier to frictionlessly give someone a penny or such for reading their site and let that add up for those who get the views, but that's just not a thing right now.
The ability to have a total stranger see your work even once is the outlier that the modern era as brought. People have jumped from that to "and thus I deserve to live off of this" and that just doesn't follow. Even making a pittance is unlikely and that's still better than any of us was likely to get even 20 years ago.
Every single YouTube creator I watch with any degree of regularity has a Patreon, merch shop, or some other way for those who appreciate their stuff to directly contribute to its production and continued existence. Many say that they rely on those sources of income a lot more than ad revenue, especially those in non-advertiser-friendly niches who have to worry about demonetization. In a no-YouTube world, even assuming p2p video streaming never works out, those folks would be able to pay for hosting with those non-ad income streams, because YouTube's scale is deceptive. Most of the ones I watch don't even have all that many views relative to the big boys - five to six digit, usually - so their viewer:contributor ratio is a lot higher than that of a successful clickbait slop video with ~zero genuine dedicated supporters but a lot of incidental ad views. This dynamic implies that creators with dedicated followings would have a decent shot at supporting themselves even if they had to pay for bandwidth, because their bandwidth spend to revenue ratio is a lot better than average.
The thing about YouTube is that slop outweighs quality content by such a massive margin that if you do napkin math around the raw cost of hosting n hours of streaming video, you end up with a way higher number than you'd have if you stripped out the bulk of the material that wouldn't be economically feasible in a non-ad-supported environment.
A corollary is that without competition from low-quality ad-supported material that couldn't hack it in a donation-centric environment, the good stuff stands out that much more. It's kinda like how you can't really post a recipe without it drowning in an ocean of algorithmically generated fake-ass life stories about grandma's cookies with seven ads before you hit the first ingredient. Without those, organic content, even paid/donation-supported organic content, has a much better shot at encountering the kind of eyeball that'll shell out for the good stuff.
I think the existence of spaces like Bandcamp (for now, anyway, fingers crossed re acquisition) demonstrates that donation-supported streaming can be economically viable. I've spent far more on Bandcamp albums I could have just kept streaming indefinitely for free than I ever did on CDs, because I know that the bulk of that money is actually going to the people who made the stuff I liked, rather than getting siphoned off into corporate middlemen a la legacy record businesses / Spotify and its ilk. Direct-to-artist support in places like Bandcamp has enabled a flowering of high-quality, niche content. People may complain about a simplistic top 40 or whatever, but I'm running into more music right up my alley than ever before, and that's largely due to the newfound ability to cut out the middleman and go right to the creator. YouTube is like the old record industry; it benefits the lowest-common-denominator painfully-focus-grouped artist far more than it does the auteur.