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We live in an age of information, but most of the information we consume is garbage. You can disagree with this statement, but it is certainly the case with me. Everyday I open up Youtube, watch those politicians, celebrities, scientists and millionaires do their shit, listen to reporters talk about things that they themselves don't understand, all while indulging in a fake sense of learning something new. But actually, I am learning nothing. The news barely scratches the surface of things, and even those "in-depth" reports almost always fail do deliver true insight. All too often, true knowledge is watered down, and facts are substituted with opinion. Am I being too pessimistic? Well, look no further than the current biggest topic: having watched COVID news for almost two whole years, how much knowledge about COVID do I have in my head? Very little.
You might say, "oh, but mass media are becoming a cesspool anyway. Just stay away from those and do your own research!" Well, how am I, an ordinary citizen, without specialist knowledge and professional equipment, supposed to do my own research? "You can just google the damn topic and read whatever you find and come to a conclusion yourself", you might say. Well then, if there is contradicting info on the Internet, how do I decide who to believe? You see, in this day and age, it has become very difficult to get real insight into most things ourselves, and we ultimately have no other choice but to place our trust in someone else for what we think is true knowledge.
Fortunately, there are exceptions to this: maths and (theoretical) physics, hard-core science whose truthfulness would never rely on opinion or belief. When a mathematical argument is presented, you are never going to be like "well, this guy looks like he knows his shit, so imma gonna trust him." Instead, you are going to follow the argument yourself and see if it's logically correct. In this way, you gain true insight into the topic at hand, and when you know you understood, you really understood.
There are maths Youtubers who know this, and they do a really great job in bringing mathematical knowledge to their viewers. Among them are Mathologer, 3blue1brown, and various others. There is one thing that unifies them and makes them stand out: they present an argument in its full. Nothing is concealed from you, and the whole thing is as clear as a mathematics textbook, maybe with more intuition, but never lacking in logical rigidity. You do not need to "trust" them to enjoy their videos, as their videos speak for themselves.
However, for some strange reason that I do not yet understand, things are not quite the same on the physics side. I cannot think of a single Youtuber that presents theoretical physics in a manner that is close to the aforementioned math Youtubers. (Except for channels that upload University level physics lectures, but those are not aimed at the masses after all.) To make things worse, physics Youtubers have very bad habits of mystifying things by leaving out key steps in their arguments, or substituting them with silly analogies. In this way, they not only make things look way more difficult than they actually are, but also make their viewers feel miserable, because every single time, the viewers seem to get there, but not quite. As this process repeats, true knowledge begins to seem very much like Kafka's castle.
Take Sabine Hossenfelder for example. Sabine no doubt belongs to the top notch of the Youtube physics world, but even she is susceptible to those very bad habits. In her latest upload on the delayed-choice quantum eraser, she devotes a whopping 1/3 of the entire video talking about a silly analogy involving a captain and his ship, and then completely fails to deliver on that analogy, as she spent only one vague sentence explaining the key point upon which this entire analogy is based. She also fell short of demystifying the fuss surrounding "history being erased", as she fails to demonstrate how the result of the experiment is dictated by the time evolution of the particles' wave function in an entirely chronic manner.
I would like to write down my own explanation of this experiment if I have time, and you can see there is no mystery whatsoever. Everything will be crystal clear, if we present our argument in the style of those maths channels. In the meantime I just want to emphasize my disappointment with Youtube physics channels. Another example is Veritasium and his wind-powered vehicle that goes against the wind. He seems to care more about showing how cool he was in carrying out that experiment, rather than focusing on the actual theory. His explanation using sails as an analogy is not bad, but he still fails to demonstrate how his vehicle could accelerate from zero speed to higher than wind speed.
I can certainly rant more about those physics Youtubers but I need to stop. As I said, I have no idea why this is the case, but math Youtubers are way better than physics Youtubers, and the trend is likely to continue.