Youtube launched 1 year and 8 months before being acquired by google.... It's largely semantics to say that what Youtube is today, isn't a direct result of Google's ownership for nearly 20 years now....
From talking to someone that worked at YouTube for 15 years, they still had a lot of core Python code in 2016 that was legacy from the OG company/team and that code needed to be transitioned to follow the Google way of doing things in C++/Go.
I don't think it was distinct enough from the Google culture like Android was at the start of the acquisition but it seems they had leeway to do their own thing.
No concept of language in a user facing way. No filter by language no search by language. On the contrary searches are translated before running and return all languages, videos are dubbed even when you speak the original language, same but with titles being translated etc. Search being shit is kind of on par with being a Google product though. I wonder if they had any language preferences before Google bought them. I don't remember that far back.
I assume that's why they wrote good and not successful.
It's an average software product with incredible scaling behind it and a lot of elbow grease to keep it chumming along, but it's not great software by the definition of "bugs actually get dealt with"
It's great software in the sense that it makes a shit ton of money though. In the end software that doesn't get used and doesn't make any money but has no bugs is not valuable either.
Not saying that this is the trade off you have to make but if you have a working mode in place that achieves usage and money somewhat consistently i can understand being hesitant about changing it to optimize for less bugs instead.
Weapons are a great product for weapon dealers and manufacturers as well, just not so much for the people killed by them (or their families, or survivors)
So sure, if making a shitload of money is the metric, YouTube is a great product.
That wasn't the point of the person you answered to though.
(1) There is no single entity called "the backbone." (2) Yes, they do direct peering with ISPs whenever possible, but maintaining on-premise cache AND the "backbone" is not a trivial matter, nor free
They're paying a marginal cost compared to us plebs, yeah, but definitely not "free", especially when YT is allegedly responsible for 1/6th of global internet traffic