If you don’t have a ridiculously high click through every time your content is displayed, your video will be displayed massively less, including to your own subscribers on the places that are supposed to be based on their subscriptions.

The only way for your actual subscribers to even be exposed to your content, on the YouTube platform, if you do not do clickbait bullshit, is literally browsing the subscription view, which people don’t do.

People have done loads of A/B testing. YouTube deliberately and systematically makes it impossible to survive on the platform without clickbait.