Sure, but why does youtube need to care? From their perspective, those videos probably aren't helping their bottom line. It might be better if they weren't uploaded in the first place: Less disk space used, no need to index them, etc.
Youtube absolutely should care. The "long tail" is one of Youtube's competitive advantages. Sure, each individual video in the "long tail" may only have a couple thousand views, but collectively as a whole the "long tail" is the reason why you instinctively check YouTube over any other site when looking for:
Those videos get me to YouTube in the first place. Once there they can try to get me to watch 'better' videos and the videos I do watch gives them lots of useful information about me that they can sell to advertisers.
(I echo your agreement, for what it's worth.)