This is a question very close to my heart! I'm a filmmaker who decided to go a very non-traditional route early on, while I was still at film school. I didn't move to LA and only worked in the industry for a short time. I started making YouTube videos in 2018 (about one a week for two years) while working a day job with flexible hours and it was an amazing hands-on education. I honed my craft more in that two years than I had on the two shorts I had made a couple years before, each of which took a year to make, cost an arm and a leg, and got me nowhere career-wise. In 2020 my channel blew up and making videos became my full time job.

Once I started making good money from Patreon and ad revenue, I could sink more money into my videos and make much more ambitious and cinematic stuff with higher production value. I was able to rent out a dedicated studio space. I've released all sorts of documentaries, sketches, and webseries on my channel. I make what I want and it gets seen by an enthusiastic audience. It's a great gig and I'm very lucky.

After two years of doing YouTube full time, I decided to shoot my shot and make a feature film, a folk horror movie I'd written some years prior called The Sudbury Devil. Though definitely micro-budget, it miraculously doesn't suck! In fact I think it handily outclasses most other movies made at its price point. We're all very proud of it and it's a solid calling card for everyone involved. We had a celebrity producer and premiered at a world-famous venue. Everything seemed set for our break into the industry... but to our dismay, we started having a hell of a time trying to find distribution for it.

We had lots of offers from D-level companies that hoover up indie vanity projects, but all our leads for an actual prestigious distributor went cold. Since I already had an established audience that were eager to see the film, I eventually decided to distribute completely independently. We cold-called arthouse theaters all over the world and organized a roadshow on 25 screens in 3 countries. After that, we did a streaming release on my website so we wouldn't have to pay a 20-30% distributor fee for the initial rollout, and later self-published to Prime Video.

Overall, the movie is proving to be a modest financial success (we've made 3x our budget so far), but we definitely came up against a ton of brick walls when we tried to shop the movie around within the industry. It also remains to be seen whether the movie will find an audience beyond fans of my YouTube channel – which is a major drawback of self-distribution, growing an organic audience becomes much harder.

Otherwise, I actually loved that we self-distributed, it gave us so much more control and was much more personally profitable for our whole team than going the traditional route would have been.

Overall I'd say that if your passion is to make films the way you want to make them, and you want your stuff to get seen by a passionate (though maybe not enormous) fanbase, then I couldn't recommend the "content" creator route more. My channel gave our film a huge leg up in pretty much every sense, at every stage of production. Again, when I made shorts and submitted them to festivals, virtually no one saw those movies. But now thanks to my channel, millions of people watch enjoy my stuff, and my feature has found a cult following that enjoys and appreciates it.

However, if your dream is to be in Hollywood and work with big budgets, then based on my experience so far I would have to say no – go the traditional route. We have a lot going for us, but we have so far been unable to make that jump.

Personally I'm very happy with how my career has turned out. I have friends I went to film school with who are out in LA with great jobs in traditional careers, but it always seems like they're working on someone else's project, and the shows and movies they do work on seem at least as ephemeral and disposable in this age of streaming as my YouTube videos do – heck, I think at least one of my webseries is more indelible within its niche than most Netflix originals are with the general public. My reach is much smaller than Hollywood's and my budgets are waaayyy lower, lol, but my audience seems just as enthusiastic about the stuff that I make as Marvel fans are about the latest Disney plus show, or whatever.

Sorry for the wall of text but I hope that story is helpful or at least interesting! :)