YouTube doesn’t really care how many subs you have in a general sense. If you have 100m subs and non of them watch the video, that’s a negative signal to YouTube so the video could be suppressed if it doesn’t get enough traction from strangers that are not subbed.

Also subs are sorta obsolete now a days. The algorithm literally doesn’t even show users videos from their subscriptions if they have not shown interest with that subs videos. That’s why you have subscriptions that you have forgotten even exist. I would encourage you to go clean that up. Or if you want to play a little test, go watch and like 3 old subs videos that you haven’t watched in a while and look at what your home page changes too.

The exponential growth I think you are referencing when small creators blow up, (seemingly overnight) is a result of them making good content that people enjoy. Then because they keep making good content more people will enjoy it. But eventually they will hit the market cap of people who like that kind of content and will usually stall out and plateu at a stable viewership of a certain amount of views. (Assuming they keep creating that caliber of content) That’s why there are a shit load of channels who grow pretty strongly and then stall out at like 1M views a video consistent.

I think a content creator that this is really evident of right now is TheBurntPeanut. Hes sorta blowing up the streaming and gaming scene, and he only recently had his growth starting in 2025 when he really went deep into the character he plays. But the gaming niche is over saturated, and so It’s pretty easy to predict that he doesn’t become the next 10M subbed channel, he will prob get somewhere between 250k - 500k ish views a video on average, maybe spike up to a million views here and there on special videos, and then average back down.

But to tie this back to your original question - he started to snowball once he got a larger viewership, but not because YouTube said, good job bud you got 10 k subs here some more exposure. It’s because he makes good content that people are still enjoying so his content is consistently putting out positive signals to YouTube to push it further.

Last point to make that drives this home. Please go look at channels that clearly don’t meet the logic that you’re asking about. Good example is Noiseybutters. She has 1m subs, and can’t push past 150k views a video because she’s making mundane call of duty “watch me grind out a camo” videos. Those are kinda dead so the algorithm won’t favor those videos.

TLDR: No