That's right, but if you're going to try to make a living creating content, you have to be able to provide for yourself. Outside of advertising, there aren't that many options for generating income - and most of the time, you have to do all of them (adverts, patreon, live appearances, swag sales, etc.) to make a living because individually they aren't enough. And this is what 'hustle' looks like in this space.

There is something off-putting about expecting some of those guys to devote hundreds of hours creating their content and then criticizing them because it's not free enough. High quality content is hard and requires talent, equipment, time and money to do.

I don't think this is "expected" of anyone. "YouTube creator" is not a career, it's a glorified hobby that can sometimes be lucrative, most of us wish we had the time and financial freedom to mess around with our hobbies and get paid for it but at the end of the day this is a fickle dream that one cannot reasonably expect to work out.