What you have to understand about the contemporary media industry is that their primary business objective is to sell advertisements. Your attention is the product now; the more of it they can sell to advertisers, the more profitable the business becomes. It's much easier to present positive quarterly earnings reports by selling eyeballs and clicks than it is selling pretty much anything else. In the before times, when media companies were primarily in the business of selling content for a monthly or yearly subscription fee, this was much less of an issue.
You can't block access to their most profitable raw material and expect them to just sit and take it.
Content is also advertisement. They benefit just as well from platform-specific content that, statistically, puts ads in front of a lot of people, and more relevantly, creates a market for people to pay YouTube to place their content in front of people.
I'm far from convinced this isn't relevant to YouTube history with controversial content. I think somebody is paying to do that, covertly or overtly. Sort of payola? I think there are ways to pay off YouTube to promote your content.
Heck, content is also advertisement in the sense that the show/film you're watching is an advertisement for all the related merchandise that will be on store shelves the same day as the media is published :) I wonder how many $millions Baby Yoda has brought in for Disney?
Well, content providers provide less consumable content now (while the raw amount explodes), that is for sure, we see it, we experience it. The result? We do not try consuming content since we see there is much less, but with much more garbage and adverse consequences.
We - wife, me, and some I know - cancels providers as they are not serving the consumer, and we feel that. Let them sell their service to ad companies then, when less and less consumers go to their site, good luck with that in the long run. They lost one customer for sure, and looking at the mood here there may be more, or will be more if they carry on like this.
You can't block access to their most profitable raw material and expect them to just sit and take it.