There are alternatives to YouTube though, there are a lot of them. It's just none of them are viable for the viewers because content creators are hell bent on never using anything other than YouTube. To the point I believe they aren't actually bothered by YouTube's problems and only occasionaly complain about it for easy views.

Personally I don't care anymore, YouTube's problems don't affect me. As long as PipePipe works I'm happy. And if it stops working I'll just stop watching YouTube, or just minimize my usage to the extent it's possible.

Lemmy already came such a long way though, when I first tried using it, it was a barren wasteland. Federated social media is the only kind of online platform that can brute force it's way into viability so I'm confident Lemmy will continue to grow or remain big enough to satisfy it's users. It just won't be as big as Reddit.