Ah, Youtube ████ the bed going hardcore political, running off the advertisers they didn't already refuse service with, and decided to de-incentivise new content creators. On top of that, they started steering their recommendations and searches away from people who didn't have a million weekly views, so that documentary on 3rd party NES controllers you made? Yeah, enjoy the 14 views you'll get over six months. That'll really help you get 1000 subscribers.
"Oh, you have nearly enough subscribers, but too little watch time? Uh, yeah, umm, we kinda' stopped sending them notifications, even though they explicitly turned them on. Jerry in PR says we should call it a GLITCH! Yeah, that's the ticket!"