Exactly! This has been going on more and more in recent years, and it's very disheartening.
I remember when I first started producing content for YT back in 2007 - even though YT had already been sold to Google at that point, YT still bore resemblance to its roots, and it was more user oriented, so as such, whenever I'd upload a new episode, I'd usually get upwards of 100 views within the first 24 hours ot upload - in the last couple of seasons, I was lucky to get at least 20 views within the first week of a new upload.
It's clear that YT, as you say, postures the partner channels that put money into their pockets, and sweeps us smaller channels under the rug. What really hurt me was when a few years ago, they messed everybody's homepage feeds to where by default, they show you popular trending and viral videos, as opposed to your subscriptions, and I'm betting that's one of the reasons why my traffic has taken a serious nose-dive in the last few years. That suspicion has been confirmed when a friend of mine recently told me she had no idea Steve's series had ended in 2013, because she hadn't even seen any of the newer episodes.
My account apparently is eligible for monetization (which would make me a partner channel), but the thing about that is, of course, YT/Google takes a percentage of your earnings, and I have such a long list of grievances against Google for what they're doing to us hard-working smaller YouTubers that I wouldn't them to see one red cent of anything I would be making money off of.
I know there are plenty of alternatives to YT, but honestly, the sad truth is YT is a necessary evil because it still is the best video sharing site out there. Others do commercials like YT does (lcukily, I have multiple adblockers, so I don't have to sit through commercials), but some either still have a limit on time or file size, which YT doesn't. Sites like ZippCast and Upload Society recreate YT's old layout and interface in everyway... including back when YT didn't offer playback higher than 360p.