Also, don’t use YouTube directly, use Invidious or Piped, and this particular issue would be gone.
It’s the convenience. If you want to run a channel, you’re kind of damned to sell your soul. 🙃 The question is for how much you’d sell yourself out completely.
Not sure, if these apps run on a desktop computer, though, which is my main workhorse.
I use DokuWiki for this type of thing. With a few add-ons it is nicely configurable (galleries, discussions etc), could be run from any webspace, and doesn’t need a database. You can have ACLs that make sure that only registered users get access. But it is a bit of a DIY solution, and takes a bit of work to set up.
My oldest “security camera” of this type has been online 24/7 since June 2019 and permanently connected to a charger of the smallest type I could find at that time. The battery still holds a charge when I take the phone down for cleaning. Not sure how old the phone itself is (a small Kyocera), probably a 2014 or 2015 model. So, for my requirements, I’d say, it’s reasonably reliable.
OTOH, you may be right, and they don’t make them like they used to in the olden days, haha.
My cheap and cheerful, but not very secure homebrew solution is a used smartphone, then load any of the motion-detection apps onto it, plus an FTP server app. Then place the phone anywhere within Wi-Fi reach. Run a script once a day on my home server that downloads and deletes the videos from the phone via FTP, and also deletes that footage after 30 days. So the “system” can run indefinitely without running out of memory. The old phones just need to be rebooted once in a while for some odd reason.
Not sure, whether it is relevant for this thread, but my phone (POCO F3) does not get any notifications if Google Play Services has no access to the internet. I scratched my head for a while to find out, why I never got them on mobile data. Not sure, what it does, if you disable the store.