OK, audiophile here, so you have a nice, juicy local target. True, I haven't done any YouTube videos, but I design and build all my own gear (mikes, preamps, A/D...) just to get the best possible performance. Before you ask, I'll confess that I suck at playing, so just do that in private for fun. But I can recognize talent and genius in others when I hear it.
In my mind, it breaks down like this:
1. The performance is first and foremost. I don't worry about it, I know that if my mikes are pointing at Lee Barber or Peter Mulvey or Southpaw Jones or whomever, the song and the performance will be great. And if it isn't, they'll do it again, they're pros. So the hardest part is out of my hands (other than wheedling these guys into letting me record them).
2. Ambient sounds are what they are. They existed during that performance. The recording is just that, a RECORD of what that performance sounded like. One of my favorite commercial recordings ever was the first Redbird album- yeah, there's a dog barking or a truck going by now and then, but who cares? it was a living room, that was the musical event, and those sounds were part of its reality. The musical event was brilliant, and the recording puts you in that living room with those freakishly talented musicians.
3. The basic point of a recording, at least to me, is to capture a hint of the reality of that moment. The hint is better if you can capture it accurately, without the recording itself adding to or subtracting from any of the actual sound of those moments. There's a Heisenberg aspect to that. So... no added noise, distortion, compression, editing, nothing.
4. Other people like to use the recording as part of the creation process, altering the sounds, altering the performance, adding things that don't exist in the real world (paging George Martin). That's fine and a valid artistic statement. It's just not what I like. I like the sounds that musicians make in the raw. I like the sounds of their voices and their instruments. That, to me, is how the musical message burrows into my brain.
5. Format debates are overblown. Bit depth only determines the noise floor, and 16 bits for playback will put you below any ambient in any practical room. You need to record at higher bit depth to reduce the criticality of level setting, but when you're done, you can master to 16 and lose nothing. Sample rates only determine high frequency bandwidth and are significant for cats, dogs, and bats- when I've done blind listening trials with 192 vs 96 vs 48 vs 44.1, neither I nor any of the younger, sharper ears could hear any difference. If your listening gear doesn't like handling out-of-band signals and noise, 44.1 might even sound better than so-called hi res.
6. Did I mention that the song and its performance are the most important things?
Most folks also don't realize how sensitive condenser mics are, or that using certain mic patterns will pick up room sounds that make a take sound decidedly un-professional.