I think, personally, that the pathway to the top tier is really, really tough. There could be a lot of reasons. I'm sure YT has a system for sorting the videos and "recommending" the videos.
I think that sorting, or recommending, can be really tough if you are on the wrong end of it.
There's a flood of videos. There's really stiff competition. There are big, global players in the market that are making basically TV commercials disguised as art to push out the smaller artists, or, to be charitable, just promote their own stuff and the marginalizing of the indies is just a side effect.

Having said that--and it may be that the market will just get worse for ppl coming in--I have a few observations.
Most videos I see are really junk. Like tech reviews, there's like a a toxic fog of BS for the first minute with really crappy music, long, stupid intros with cheap graphics. You click like mad to get through it, or, more likely, you turn it off. In fact, there are so many of these that it becomes a feeding cycle--ppl see the junk and they imitate it.

2nd thing I mention is that even if you have a seriously good video, there are so many videos in the market that no one can find it. I call this the haystack effect. Used to be, you look for a song, you get 3 or 4 covers, now the list goes off the page and there is no way to find anything. Of course, this then hinges critically on page ranking and you are back to the way Google, for whatever reason, rates the vids.

Third thing I mention is there is a "bump" number to make a dent in the market. I call it a bump number. You can think of it as being visible from space. Ten years ago, the bump number was like 5 or 6 vids and you have an audience. Now that number is like 100. And 100 is a lot of videos. When that bump number gets to like 250 it will be almost impossible for most new players to get into the market.

OTOH, it only takes one viral video. There's more noise, but there is still a path. That path allows small budget players to compete big time. That's a paradigm shift. For example, more people watch classical music on our channel than all of the orchestras, chamber music groups, big symphonies, whatever, in California combined.
If we were starting from scratch, we would have a really tough time but I think it is still doable. In five years? In fact, in two years? Dunno. Probably not. So then what? An indie only platform is my guess.

I don't think out team has a warped PoV--we just know more about our corner. But we study all the videos. We do a ton of research every day. For example, when we looked at lighting, we looked at makeup videos which are a gigantic share of the market.
99.9 videos make the same mistakes over and over. I would not be surprised if YT can identify these mistake patterns and factor them in.
My point about the big companies making ads disguised as art is going to be a real problem in the future--I don't see any way around that.
All I'm saying is that the market is getting vastly more competitive, and YT is making some choices about ranking content, but one can still get into the market, so if you want to really get into the market, now is way better than later. It can change tomorrow.

Here is the article. I'm just going to state unequivocally that the results are invalid because a substantial part of the underlying citations are more than ten years old. Ten years in YouTube is just way too old for study sources, data sets, &c. There's like a six month turnover, if that.
That doesn't mean some of the stuff is off base; it just means that the methodology is hopelessly out of date.
https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10.1177/1354856517736979

That study is completely meaningless.

If you're savvy and talented, you can use the platform for free to promote your business, sell merch, tutorials and workshops and earn a six-figure income. What the article fails to mention is that of those 97% earning below poverty income from their channel (again false, because the researcher has no idea how much YouTubers earn other than perhaps YT advertising revenue, which can be relatively small compared to other sources of income generated by their channels), most either have no intention of earning their livelihood from YT alone and it's not their full-time career; and for those at the very bottom, it could just be that their content does not attract viewers because it's boring (mine for example!) LOL

The study does not take into account the quality or usefulness of the channels, whether the creators put any time and effort into their thumbnails; if they included descriptions and proper tags; if they regularly examine their stats and take advantage of them; production value, or anything else for that matter.

@DrDave Care to share one or two links?

@DrDave I can’t believe those weren’t in my recommended list. hehe

It could be--I have seen over the years more than 20 videos get a big initial bounce (subscribers is necessary for the first bounce), then go into stealth more for a year, then pop up to 10x or 20x the "sleep" number of views. But it only affects certain videos.....maybe 10 percent of all our videos.

@DrDave

I suggest you to see some example of neural network visualizations (not network itself, but functions) to understand how messy it is.

You do not see all this local minimums and maximums mess as channel properties play very significant role.

As soon as you get video from big channel, slightly rename and cut 2 seconds and put on low popular channel - you will see how algorithm behavior will drastically change and suddenly most of such videos are no longer good and must not be recommended to anyone.

One thing most people do not understand is that present Youtube approach is artificial, it is being won by corporations during hard but silent fight.

In early internet days you could see power of society and self organizing groups linking to each other and making special links pages. Rings and so on. This is proper way to deal with lot of information and complexity.

Idea to rely on complex algorithm owned by greedy people (who also tweak it and live be selling places in results) is very BAD idea.

@Energy80s

You mean that al of Youtube owners must suddenly get brain tumor? :-)

@robertGL So, all of those useful Youtube videos linked in this forum you skip as a matter of principle, or you just are not interested? Why does your account matter? Any of your views of any Youtube videos affect those evil algorithms. I don't understand.