I think the article is overthinking it a little bit, and I think it comes down to accessibility, enthusiasm, and to a certain degree a rapid pace in terms of content. There's no doubt that YouTube has made a number of these topics far more accessible. The inclusion of videos along side typical text searches means that it's just as easy to click on an article as it is one of those videos. There's also typically a mult…
Youtube deserves no credit: they do nothing to make educational videos more discoverable, they cannot even categorise them properly! My 'feed' is filled with videos I already watched and typically the only way I discover new content is linked from HN or other sites. Neither does Youtube treat their educational creators well - as far ad they are concerned, 'influencer' reviewing funny viseos has more value than educat…
For me, YouTube serves me up so much educational content i want to watch that there is over 100 hours of content in my Watch Later. And i do very often go through the videos it gives me but it never ends.
YouTube is a tool, you have to do a bit of curation so it learns what you like and dislike, and then it just delivers an unending firehose of content matching that. And if what you like is educational content, boy is there a lot of it available.