The theme of people hopping on the popularity bandwagon isn't anything new or unique to YouTube. Pretty much every piece of media will have trends where someone does something new and interesting and everyone else copies them. Like when the must do thing was adapting YA dystopian novels to movies after Hunger Games, the trend of "artsy", more story driven indie games (I can't remember which game kicked this off though), the trend of supernaturally teen romance novels after Twilight, and so on. Creativity is always nice, but YouTube and these creators aren't to blame for this phenomenon.
