I kinda miss when places would host their own videos instead of relying on youtube, but that's the problem of a centralized internet, the majority of people won't want to leave yt/ig/fb/tiktok/twitter/reddit in order to watch or read whatever you posted.
As someone who's written in-browser player and transcoding/server code...the lemmy/mastodon etc. version of this can work, especially if flexible bitrate handling is baked into it (i.e., bitrate offer/acceptance matching over a protocol). You can get this down to YouTube interface + install some software + open a port on your firewall.
Centralisation and large scale has it's benefits. There were also many problems with everybody hosting their stuff by themselves. Enshittification is results of private companies having to go profit first (and google being google of course), not so much because they are the only game in town. Being the monopoly merely enables the shitting on users for profit.
I see youtube and many google services more like internet's utilities that are privately owned and that is causing problems, not that they have gotten so big.