While I have some sympathy with this position I think it's worth remembering that there's a huge long-tail of absolute rubbish on YouTube.

The fact that they keep it around, for free, over years and years, and at no cost to the user is remarkable to me.

Yes, YouTube is quite good if your data is absolute rubbish and you’re pleasantly surprised by anything less than full deletion.

Expecting any company to store infinite content for free forever is a bit of a curious expectation

Yeah I remember when image sites all stopped their free tier a few years ago and it broke a lot of old forum posts.

There's a reason why serious archiving of knowledge is left to government institutions.

Is it actually anyways best interest to permanently store everything that has been uploaded to Youtube? I think it would be very reasonable to purge every video uploaded by non-partenered channels that hasn't uploaded in 5 years or the video hasn't been watched in 10 years.

Let me fix it for you "... it would be very reasonable to purge every public video uploaded by non-partnered channels that hasn't uploaded in 5 years, except the very first and the very last video by that channel, along with the videos that haven't been watched in 10 years."

Personally that would delete a lot of niche music videos where it's been like 10 years since they last uploaded to that channel.

There is niche and then there is "no one has watched even a second of this in 10 years"

As much as I don't like Google or Youtube - expectation that they will just store whatever stupid stuff you post forever is unreasonable.

Like I posted some gaming highlights when I was teen and I don't think anyone, but I have ever watched them and I don't even have access to that account anymore. All of that stuff should be deleted.

Even now I occasionally have itch to make a video and I am the only one who watches them, but at least they are good enough for me that I return to watch them.