Yeah. It’s like how one of the growing YouTube monetisation avenues is basically kept in a strait jacket. YouTube Membership or more specifically channel memberships, are a one way street, it all has to start with Google, YouTube is the video platform, the the point where I would pay a the damn extortion money, App Store style, to be able to sync a user that signed up off YouTube to a membership platform like Memberful or Patreon, over so their YouTube account has appropriate permissions… it’s a one way street though, they have a discord integration, and that’s basic the only useful feature that goes outside the weirdly hidden YouTube channel member extras pages that I continue to find people who join a channel to support it but don’t actually discover the extras! That’s how badly managed this is.
They do care what the competition is doing, but the company is such a large and slow machine that it takes them many years to change course even slightly. that means when they see their competition doing something new and innovative, it takes many years to even get to the same point.