A reasonable point, but the lack of transparency from YouTube's end means their pitch to content creators is basically 'trust us.' There's no way for new entrants to the market to predict how much they can make in proportion to views, so they're incentivized to just chase the lowest common denominator all the time.

Given the scale and metrics involved, seems pretty nominal. Maybe not free, but for the context might as well be. Something that could be highly automated if it were transparent and fair.

I work in the space... that level of visibility is a trade secret because it exposes contracts like isp hosting costs... it's also hard to calculate... and it's definitely non-trivial.

it's not going to be exposed because why show your cards, you're not a CDN. And there's a reason people use YouTube not CDNs and it's not just the complexity and discovery, it's still not super cheap.