So, if a lot of your viewers think your channel is good enough to donate to, ad money basically becomes an afterthought.
I don't think this is realistic, most people will not open their wallets, especially since they can't just go around paying a monthly subscription to everyone they watch. Even if their Patreon earnings were higher, I doubt their YouTube earnings would be insignificant.
Dead Meat starts at $1 per month not $5, they have 23,300 paid members. But their YouTube looks like it gets millions of views per month (you don't only get views on new videos like you suggested, but old videos can get lots of views too as you build up a back catalog). And this is a channel that I found by doing a Google search for most successful YouTube Patreons.
Wow their YouTube has 2.97 billion views
Would be a good time to get the anime going again in the meantime? Plz??