There are many acquisitions that lead to better products.
They're more lucrative for creators/streamers and have further reach but the platform experience is noticeably worse.
But there's also hundreds of examples of the opposite happening: Successful products being bought by a big company and then killed post acquisition.
We probably won't know which camp Pixelmator will fall into for a few years yet.
Not to mention all the topics that have been soft-banned because one algorithm flags those videos as not monetizable, and the next algorithm decides that only showing or recommending videos that can show ads results in the most add revenue
I don't think YouTube is clearly better or worse than it was before acquisition, and maybe an independent YouTube would have walked the same path. It is simply a very different platform that was ship-of-theseusd
Follow some channels like Practical Engineering or Veritasium ... both good quality, information dense. Yes, decent production values, but that's not a bad thing at all in my book.