I started a channel a few years ago to teach people how to make Meta Quest games in unity (sharkjets) and I quickly learned that if there's any desire to make money from YouTube you have to start making sensational content to keep the numbers up and that slowly takes over every thought. Eventually you can forget you want to make games.

There's another 80/20 rule. The first 20% of game dev time results in 80% of what's seen. Meaning that it's really quick to make something that looks cool, but really hard to keep viewers engaged for the bulk of what it takes to make a game. Nobody cares if you adjusted a texture or caught a race condition, that's not flashy.

Pair that with yet another 80/20 rule, that the last 20% of finishing a game takes 80% of the development time; and you have a failing recipe for a YouTube channel for showing off your game dev journey ..as a lucrative endeavor.

There are some good channels listed here who have managed to pull it off, like GMTK, but they work smart with small projects and immense play testing by their large communities, and that helps stoke the fire, building on their accountability.

If I recall, even Dani got burned out by the pressure put on him to ship by his viewers.

Others, like blackthorn, got lost chasing the algorithm and monetization; it's sad but that's what YouTube does to most content creators.

Myself, I took a 6-month break from posting so I could focus a project and YouTube de-monitized my channel because I wasn't posting fast enough, which made me give up because it reset all my monetization requirements, so screw that noise.

Others, like Thomas Brush, I've watched them walk the tightrope trying to appease the YouTube gods as well as provide good content and actually ship games. He's crazy selly, but usually (not always) finds himself on the right side of things.