I find it hard to believe that you only get one viewer on every video, unless your content is absolute garbage. If you are consistent and create content that is at least interesting to some viewers, you will eventually get at least few hundred views after few months on at least some of your videos. I speak from my own experience, and my videos weren't that great anyway, just had interesting idea I guess (although I eventually failed to upload further videos).
Depends a lot on niche. I sometimes upload interesting Yu-Gi-Oh matches in Master Duel, and the highest viewcount is 32, from an upload December of last year. On the other hand, a low effort VTuber edit is sitting at 1400 views.
Some of that is content categorization in the eyes of the all-seeing algorithm. Let's say you upload a type of content "A" that gets big views but you've been uploading a type of content "B" that gets small views for a while. The youtube algorithm will aggressively try to grow content A and massively deprioritize content B, even among other channels that produce content B.
A guy I know who does youtube/twitch had to create a second channel for his content B because it would get sub-1k views when he would get tens of thousands of views on his content A. Just by uploading somewhere else he started to get higher view counts.
Exactly why that happens isn't known, but a common theory is that youtube wants to push what it knows works. They have no real reason to give your content B a chance because they know content A will sell. And they do this even though this outcome was the result of a feedback loop.
That may be a contributing factor, my most viewed stuff are a couple of anime clips sitting at hundreds of thousands of views, but niche is still the #1 explanation in my eyes, as even the big and successful Master Duel channels stay at only a couple thousand views per upload. There's just not enough people interested in certain types of content.
Ya, my videos are super niche. After almost 10 years I'm just now approaching 1000 subs. Granted I only started putting effort into my edits the last few years but still, it's tough out there.
i post absolute garbage 5 second clips of whatever I'm working on (literally zero effort made, zero fucks given) and every now and then they get like more than a thousand views
I have actually made a few YouTube videos, and the shorter they are, the easier it is to get viewers, especially with a small channel. People are much more willing to give a one minute video a shot.