YouTube and creators make significantly more from premium users than ad-supported. But I’m okay with that. I’m paying for a service, that service works (mostly) great. I get essentially Spotify and ad-free YouTube for that price, and thus get far more bang for my buck than a Max subscription or a Hulu subscription or whatever.
A lot of the features of YouTube Premium (ad-free, downloads, offline music, background play and PiP on mobile, video queues, etc.) are likely available from other YouTube clients, but given how much I use the service I don’t mind paying for it. Especially since using other clients sucks for the creators (unless you’re personally subscribing to everyone’s Patreon, and I don’t know about you but there are a few channels I subscribe to on Patreon and FAR more that I just…watch).