I understand the motivation but this mindset has failure modes of its own: I'm noticing an increasing number of longform YouTube essay channels adding tons of unnecessary padding to increase the runtime. They don't all do this-- to pick a random example, I think Defunctland videos are exactly as long as they need to be-- but a bunch of the smaller ones do. Ultimately there's no metric shortcut for actual quality.

The other failure is that youtube wants quantity over quality. That incentivizes some bad behaviors. The hbomber video about plagerism is ultimately about that. Taking shortcuts, using 3rd parties (or now AI) to write scripts. It's all really negatively impacted the medium.

AI in particular is like coke to lazy content makers. I've had to drop a few because it became clear that AI took the lead in writing.