Youtube.com is literally the 2nd most popular website on the internet right now, right after Google.com. It has 34 billion monthly views, according to SimilarWeb. Sure, it has a few problems, but for its size, it's been doing very well.
Regarding creativity and "cringe": Youtube is absolutely enormous. Take a moment to curate your feed, and you'll find absolutely amazing new content every day. You can find whatever you want on youtube.
Regarding music: TikTok popularizing a few songs or artists doesn't make it a default streaming platform. Fun music trends =/= actual music streaming. You might as well say that TikTok will kill Spotify, or, by extension, it will kill production companies. No, these are different things with different roles. Plus, none of it is zero-sum. TikTok helps popularize songs that people later find on Youtube, Youtubers make montages of TikTok reels, etc.
Regarding censorship: I do believe you that certain gray-area decisions were made regarding demonetization, but they've been burnt badly for not demonetizing certain types of videos. Advertisers react very sensitively to their ads being displayed on "risky" videos. "Risky" usually means covid, politics or gender. "Risky" also includes figures like Rogan or Peterson who have gotten into recent scandals.
Music videos pass because they can be considered art to a larger extent. But even then I remember when Nas' purple-gay-prison video came out, I viewed it a few times, and Youtube never showed it to me in recommendations (which it always does.) This tells me there's definitely some shadow management going on with riskier music videos.
Without advertisers, Youtube doesn't exist, along with all the value it brings to the world. It's a tradeoff, because the perfect solution doesn't exist.
All in all, I've felt like Youtube was one of the most sober, calm and unbiased platforms during all this. For example, when the war just broke out, I got a video recommended to me called "Why Ukraine is the West's Fault." It was an amazing analysis by a certain Chicago professor, and it quickly had 26 million views. Google's official position was to block Russian state channels on Youtube, but they never went with all out censorship, which was basically the default decision by everyone else.
