Production, sure. Operational costs, not so much zero. I don’t understand how people think video streaming on any scale can be supported without any income. I don’t think they’re recent pricehike is reasonable, but to think anyone deserves to be able to stream 4k video (albeit low bit rate) without any sort of compensation is beyond me.
I pay for Youtube Premium, because I get a legit way to bypass ads and the creators I watch gets payed more than if I watched ads, but I also use an adblocker pretty much everywhere because they are intrusive and annoying. However I’m not under any illusion that doing so does directly hurt the income of the sites I visit.