I sub to channels and use Youtubes recommendations and new for you to find additional channels etc but I don’t watch them I use Metube and a browser plugin and download the videos to a directory. I don’t get all the privacy but I also am not giving them much watch data and I can avoid the ads.
Mine are only 25k hours or so, around 3 years. My prior set of disks had a single failure at 6 years but I replaced them all and went to bigger capacity. There is also the power saving aspect of going down to 2 drives as well, it definitely saves some power not spinning 4 extra drives all the time.