YT’s ad revenue only pays out fractions of a penny, if you want to make money on content creation, you’re better off doing that through crowdfunding eg. with BuyMeACoffee, and that revenue stream is platform-agnostic.
Also, PeerTube’s design basically allowing you to own your content can work out well for hobbyists which already have some other income source as well, better than being at the mercy of Google.
The Goanna browsers will run on pretty low-spec hardware, and there’s also h.264ify for sites like YT, unless Google blocked YT from loading on Goanna browsers.