as opposed to...?
As opposed to putting effort and quality into your channels because you care more about making good content, the opposite of doling out soulless videos only meant to garner popularity and/or money. If a video's purpose is to gather views and nothing else, than it's not really a video worth watching.
This is the reason why the view counter was added: the better the video, the more views it gets. The more views it gets, the more youtube promotes the video and the channel it was released on. I guess it was supposed to encourage people to release greater content, but it just made people make their video stand out or gather attention without having to put effort into the videos themselves. This is why the whole "Reply girl" trend was a thing for the longest time, or why a lot of pointless let's play videos get a lot of views.
The reply girls issue was actually the reason the view count was tweaked to only increase as people watched the majority of the video instead of just clicking on the video, that way you wouldn't increase the view count by clicking on a video with misleading details. It helped, but there's still a large amount of channels that only exist to gather views without publishing any sort of worthwhile content.
There's still a lot of good channels on youtube, though. There are still a lot of people who really care about what they do, and that's what adds to the novelty of their videos. Nothing beats being able to watch somebody do something they're passionate about, or they enjoy doing.
