You’re completely correct, but I want to explore it a bit more.
It’s not like YouTube didn’t also need to do these things, but they had the advantage of being more or less the first to even try, therefore had the fairly substantial benefit of being able to grow gradually as their traffic volume increased from the late 00s into the early 10s.
Any YouTube competitor entering the scene needed to hit the ground running and didn’t have the luxury of being able to gradually scale up. They need to match YouTube immediately, or be considered an inferior platform.
YouTube was first, and everyone else needed to play catch-up with a headwind.