I mean, it depends on your outlooks, your goal, and who you serve. If you're only serving yourself, only wanting $ and only wanting monetisation, then yeah, I guess it is a bit of a "joke" (I had my complaints about it at the start as well) but I think in the long term it makes sense.
If you're only after monetisation, reall you should be looking elsewhere for $. some 30k+ channels getting THOUSANDS of views, struggle to make $100 a month, and $100 a month is the youtube minimum monthly payout. If you don't reach $100 in a month, you have to wait 2 months, if you have roughly 1k subscribers and not as many views, but you've JUST made monetisation, you could be waiting 3-4+ months to get any payout at all...
You could get a part time job and make SIGNIFICANTLY more in far less time.
Now, if you simply want to serve the best content you can, and you're happy to do this for years without worrying about monetisation. then you can focus on making great content that people actually want to watch, and the watch time will come before you even know it. It's all about priorities and what we care about most as creators.