YouTube has been showing me a ton of channels with low Hundreds of views recently, and they’re very to my taste. Ymmv but they’re doing well at exactly what you’re complaining about in my experience
Yeah I've noticed that YouTube almost always recommends me one or two videos with less than 100 views now. Must be a relatively recent change. The videos are often pretty relevant and pretty good, which is a bit depressing. Seeing people put a lot of work into videos that nobody watches (by YouTube standards) is sad. Though that is the reality of most channels. Maybe this change will help them.
I have a conjecture, they're using you as a barometer to see how you react to it compared to people with similar profiles
I've seen a couple that go on to get decent viewcounts, but I don't care enough to keep tabs on anything in particular
Then again, I do have 10 hour a day watch time average, my data is vast, but highly skewed