no, you havent missed the boat, people move in and out of youtube all the time, it's as simple as if you're determined enough to break through? You have give five or six months with no activity, start fresh, you'll eat steak again the next year I'm sure, and it doesnt have to be the most appealing food, you can make simple foods that are cheap and good, since everything is so goddamn expensive, less about you, more about what people want, get used to that mindset.
send me a message if you're serious about building a channel, I hang around here and shitpost enough, I can guide you through the process if you're willing to endure a bit of pain and anguish of getting little to no views for a while. I made my wife a promise early on building her brand, thirty videos, I help film, direct, create, that she would get a thousand subs...... she blew right past that, and now has a channel that gets thousands of views a day after posting a video, tens of thousands weeks later, some have hundreds of thousands.
not charging a dime for this stuff, film making was a hobby, dabbled on YT for several years, figured out how to work that system (a bit lazy to put in the work), but if you really want to grow your channel and possibly make an income from it (it wont be much at the beginning), then send me a message, better than a bunch of posts that get lost.