If one day YT sets a “minimum requirements” page on their website to access their content, they’ve immediately ceded market share to the next upstart. Imagine if they broke viewing for all of the countless cheap (and e-waste) phones, tablets, low end IOT devices, “smart TVs”, and so on because they place a requirement that the device cannot meet. Those users will not throw away their hardware - they’ll migrate to the first available alternative way to watch content.

This all incorrectly assumes that there exists any viable competition to switch to. YouTube ran at a net loss for over a decade to get the reach they currently have, only because Google was one of the very few companies who could feasibly afford to do so. Nobody else with the resources to compete with YouTube is willing to compete with YouTube, because of the massive cost required to get even a fraction of that user base, let alone a critical mass.

And most of the content people access YouTube for is only found on YouTube, so those hypothetical users aren’t going to switch to a new platform, they’re going to either just flat-out stop watching or will replace their devices.