Before YouTube, people used to share knowledge of how to do shit with computers/electronics/everything on forums. I still go and find info on those forums more often than on YouTube. Nothing would be lost is perhaps a slight over exaggeration, but not a hyperbole. I can't remember the last time I used YouTube for anything else but entertainment.
Yes, the western big media is controlled by billionaires and serves their "propaganda". Whereas Chinese media and propaganda is controlled by the government.
They would be pretty terrible at their jobs if anyone could immediately tell it's a propaganda site. They know what they're doing. They're good at it, your case proves it.
Show me a single article where they criticise the government on serious issues, and not just parroting what other outlets are reporting to make them appear legitimate.
If they didn't report on these, plenty of other outlets would. Reporting everything themselves, good and bad, allows them to control the narrative more and infuse articles with just enough propaganda.
The best propaganda is the one you don't realise is propaganda.
Yes, it breaks the usability completely. But some of those issues can be fixed with more code. E.g. custom search and copy+paste would be pretty easy to do.
As for OCR, any solution would be futile against it. If a human can see it, robot can too.