ArchiveTeam is working on backing up selected channels/videos to the Internet Archive, where they can also be watched via their Wayback Machine. You can help them decide what is culturally or historically important enough to save.

ArchiveTeam generally is an interesting project I highly recommend people read about.

Their YouTube project can be seen here: https://wiki.archiveteam.org/index.php/YouTube

And you can learn how to get involved (by running a virtual machine appliance) here: https://wiki.archiveteam.org/index.php/ArchiveTeam_Warrior

Do you happen to know if there are any project or talk of not archiving the video content itself, but instead the transcripted content instead? I feel that this would be very advantageous to archive knowledge based (versus delivery based, such as prank and stand up comedy) videos much more efficiently than the videos themselves.

Someone below brought up a very good point about many of these videos being much longer than they need to be (mainly for reimbursement and ad reasons). If the transcripted content can be archived, it could also be abridged and/or summarized as well as being combined with other similar video content as well.

I'm sort of thinking as I go here now, but I would think that perhaps Youtube has an API that lets you access the closed captions of videos?

I would be kinda worried that one day youtube just send them a take down notice because it violates something in their eula.

and you can use yt-dlp to download bits you want to save yourself.