I think youtube should not be mixed into old web. Either embed your video in website and provide download, or host it on peertube. I know about video file hosting issues and costs, so maybe use appropriatly sized videos? Low quality, low resolution, compress as much as possible, and it will probably won't take more than any average website. :)
There's no way for a video platform to work without some sort of payment. Video costs money. Thankfully, Cloudflare R2 is enough for the average blogger. You just gotta figure out how to use it.
I'm building a short-form video platform with R2 as the storage backend. I figured out transcoding but I definitely need a better server for it. The old web isn't coming back because "free" is rife for abuse.
I've embedded a video on my homepage from my platform (dogfooding). Not sure I'll share the platform here when I soft launch next week or so, HN doesn't like incomplete products.
All this to say, video with decent quality is possible for the average website.
video is a file like anything else.
so .txt costs money; .zip costs money index.html costs money.
Youtube did it for a decade, google did it for another before it got ridiculous.
Yeah, back in the day we used to just put a 160x120 or 320x240 .mov or .avi or whatever and link to it with a thumbnail .jpg. Ah, now I'm remembering how sometimes there would be low/med/high quality with a resolution/filesize so you know which one to grab :)