

It’s a mess. You first run into bandwidth problems on the incoming streams. But you also run into a problem with the device support matrix.
If you say “We’ll support H.264, H.265, AV1, AV2” and “We’ll support 480p, 720p, 1080p, 4k”. Now you’d be asking the clients to do 16 different encodes to upload.
This gets more complicated if you add more streams or supported formats. You also end up needing to coordinate that with the client.
AFAIK, the way youtube currently handles this problem is they have dedicated encoders for live streams and fast encoding. For popular videos they do a second step where they do a more full matrix to optimize viewership.
IDK what youtube does for storage (if anything).

Yup. It’s something that won’t be fixed for decades. Trump has seriously damaged the ability for the US to do international trade.