YouTube is sort of mandatory if you want your stuff to reach a mainstream audience--like, if I want my Dad to watch any new cartoons I make, it HAS to be uploaded on YouTube so he can easily watch it on his preferred method, being the TV app.
However, that is offset by an algorithm that basically requires the impossible from animators or literally anything else that takes time and effort to do--you need to upload every single day, possibly even multiple times a day, AND the videos need to be on the longer side, which is why the site now is mostly flooded with idiots sitting in front of their camera and just ranting on about their opinions of any topic in the world for 20 minutes to 2 HOURS straight, even if the thumbnail, video title or comment section answers the question posed much more succinctly.
The reason I latched onto Newgrounds in the first place back in 2018 was because my animations were consistently getting more views and especially more comments and feedback on what I could improve upon than I could ever hope to achieve on YouTube (unless I give up on the idea of making animations on YouTube and just make easy-to-edit gameplay videos, similar to OneyNG). Keep in mind that this was before Friday Night Funkin' existed and made NG somewhat popular with young teens again, and of course long before more "mainstream" websites to upload art to, like Twitter, ArtStation, DeviantArt and Reddit, collectively commit Hara-Kiri on themselves, forcing even more people to at least consider Newgrounds.
If you had asked me this back when I was 15 or 16, I would have said FlipNote Hatena is a better place to get noticed (at least by other aspiring artists) than YouTube, too. Algorithms in websites like YouTube make it too hard to stand out just by making good, honest content, you have to focus more on quantity and cynically gaming the system instead, often to the severe detriment of your mental health (or even physical health in the case of those Mukbang channels). It's the same reason you would see smaller websites like NG, Furaffinity and Mastodon draw a firm line in the sand against stuff like NFTs and AI-generated "content," while YouTube and its ilk are basically forcing this instant-gratification crap on its users whether they want to or not.
TL;DR You might have to at least re-upload your stuff on YouTube if you want normies to easily watch your stuff, but don't expect tons of views outside of your real-life family and friends (assuming you SPECIFICALLY remind them every time you upload a new video), especially if you do something like an animation channel, where there could be MONTHS or even YEARS between uploads.
Also, many recent changes to YouTube, specifically its crackdown on ad-blockers while also making the ads as irritating as possible, while ALSO making the ad-free YouTube Premium subscription absurdly priced for what little it does, have made it increasingly hard for me to really enjoy watching YouTube in general. It's like cable TV all over again. It will be interesting to see how much more unpleasant Google can make the YouTube watching experience be before it's no longer even relevant to ask if YouTube is worth it (or at least TikTok replaces YouTube in these forum questions). Similar to how, up until Elon Musk's takeover, people kept recommending I upload on Twitter to get more mainstream exposure, but now people tell me it's not worth it to upload on the site in general because it's dying.