>Recoding and hosting and transmitting video is so expensive that I can assure you Youtube does not exist
Many such platforms exist; starting a new one from scratch without monetization scale would be difficult, but certainly not impossible. The real expense when scaling would seem to me to be moderation of illegal content actually, since you have to pay people for that.
Hosting:
I'm fairly sure many streaming solutions (HLS, MPEG-DASH?) work by having the client request chunks of content pre-rendered at specific bit rates. Ergo the actual chunks are static content.
IPFS does static content and Cloudflare does a free IPFS gateway.
There's no technical reason someone couldn't put together a WordPress-for-Video system - or even add video to Wordpress. (Although that would almost certainly suck for performance reasons.)
The big problem is discovery. A lot of people are wondering about decentralised server networks with an open discovery/search system built on top.
That's a horrendously hard project for social as well as technical reasons. But it's badly needed to drag the web out of the corporate swamp it's currently drowning in.
I’d say the problem is less discovery as it is monetization.
The total bandwidth for one of these creators’ videos is not itself all that massive. Particularly if you are not live streaming, a few thousand dollars in hosting costs a year to get 100TB/mo dedicated servers in a couple datacenters.
But once you have the servers humming and serving a few million views a month, whose ads are you running alongside your content?
Patron is fractions of a percent of the GDP of YouTube’s content creator payout, and patron works for only a fraction of creators. It’s not even a comparison.
I have worked on a video streaming service[1] and I also worked for a company that did sell ad space on their own and with this background I can tell you that I do believe that it should be possible for him to set up his own video distribution site. You are right that he probably does not have the technical expertise to build it himself, but he makes about 1 Million Euro a Year. He probably has enough cash on hand to hire a team that can.
[1] Although a kind of specialized one with a lot simpler scaling characteristics compared to a YouTube replacement.
Many such platforms exist; starting a new one from scratch without monetization scale would be difficult, but certainly not impossible. The real expense when scaling would seem to me to be moderation of illegal content actually, since you have to pay people for that.