Then again, maybe there are ways to make that burden smaller.

Yes: encode on lower resolutions.

Most of the videos on Youtube don’t ever need to be 4K. They don’t even need to be 1080p. Heck, most don’t even need 720p! Things like music videos, where what’s important is the music, orthings like old TV broadcasts or play rips of old consoles, where the source barely gets to 360p, can be encoded to 360p or even 244p without any suffering (I played Monster Hunter on the 3DS for years and I can attest 244p can do great works of magic).

This mixes wonderfully with Peertube’s idea about hosting your own instance. If you are hosting your own video storage, you’ll want to maximize the amount of stuff you can throw into it. If someone complains that your videos aren’t 1080p, tell them to go to /donate.php and do their part.