I don't think that even if Google avoided the tactics they used, you still could not compete with YouTube. Alphabet has as one of its goals cultural "guidance". This is openly advocated by Eric Schmidt in his book 'A New Digital Age.' They ran YouTube at a gigantic ongoing loss for over a decade solely to suppress competition and establish themselves as the only viable video platform. If you can build a billion-dollar infrastructure, and after those bills are paid you can lose hundreds of millions of dollars a year running it, than and only then can you compete with YouTube and face these tactics in addition to all of the legal and political pressure Google can produce. They haven't even needed to break out political pressure (and by that I mean getting government to establish regulations and legislation that YouTube is omitted from by being grandfathered in, not any kind of 'conservative/liberal bias' sort of thing) yet. And so long as Alphabet is profitable, we may never see those tactics as they're simply not needed.
YouTube is a key factor in Alphabet exercising the cultural 'guidance' that Eric Schmidt argues is not only Googles responsibility but moral obligation. For people who agree with Schmidt and disagree with the position that the public should be permitted to decide their own future, good or bad, it will be impossible to gain their support. Make no mistake, that viewpoint is the one that has supported every monarchy, dictatorship, theocracy, and non-democratic social structure throughout history. Political scientists call is Conservatism with a capital C, whereas the view that the public should play a role in their own governance and decide their own fate, for good or ill, is the alternative that drove the American Revolution, French Revolution, and countless blood-soaked revolutions across the globe. It won every single one of those wars. But it, too, lost to Google.
Just consider, if 70+% of the public today believed that interracial marriage was offensive and disgusting, which was true when interracial marriage was legalized by the Supreme Court in the 1960s, Google would deplatform anyone who agreed with the legalization of interracial marriage in order to defend that status quo. They do not seek to provide an open, global platform that can host or play a part in public debate about serious issues. They seek to exercise cultural guidance as Eric Schmidt sees fit. It has been the public which has reliably improved over time and progressed while still containing contingents of nuts and extremists. And it has progressed not despite that, but because of it. No closed and centrally managed society in history has become more progressive except through dreadfully bloody revolutions that destroyed its management.