I would say this stems from the the social benefits of consuming content that others consume.

If a large swatch of people with even weakish bonds all watch the same thing, that's a lot of additional value. Smaller groups consuming the same stuff can also work, but you need very strong bonds to commensurate.

The latter stands a chance of producers have a UBI to fall back on. It's kind of like how growing an orchard takes 10 years to turn a profit, but growing a wheat field is instant gratification.

Someone like TikTok, yes, but TikTok is the exception, not the norm. Maybe this works when the content quality difference is limited between top and bottom creators.

Instagram could pull off what TikTok did, but not YouTube.