Jenny_Bruce thanks for the input, especially about the Bookmark concept - I'll have to check that out!
But I guess I'm less concerned about hiding content than trying to have some semblance of organization that users could wrap their head around.
WARNING: BEGIN MS RANT! (and nothing related to anyone on this thread)
And maybe the following is nullified by uploading videos to a Sharepoint Site (which I've not yet tried, since I was investigating this stuff in 2020 and probably everything has changed now)
I'm feeling like, the question becomes "Does MS think that a Sharepoint site just should not have videos?" Why not just dump all video content for all topics into the singular Stream portal and just let users use Search for anything they need? (aside from the fact that the Stream portal sucks for any kind of organization whatsoever and MS's own analytics showed that no one used the Stream Classic portal)
I guess our approach was to use Sharepoint Communication Sites to build out an "education/training" intranet where we could have some kind of structure to the content based on flow, phases, software applications... whatever. But now it feels like anything we want to have in an intranet, MS has an entire platform for (Yammer (er, I mean Viva) for forum Q&A stuff, Stream Classic (er, I mean "for Sharepoint") for video, Delve for ... (what the hell is Delve??) and on and on).
It's like the MS philosophy has become "just dump your users into ocean that is M365 and let them just go wild with creating anything they want in any way they want"