We need maps for the study of history as geography is a very important aspect. With that said, my problem with maps aren't the maps themselves - it's the way people interpret the maps. Often times people with a genuine interest but a superficial understanding of certain areas of history (which is totally okay by the way) are lead to what I like to call 'fast food history' because of maps. I've seen arguments between people about who the greatest conqueror of all time is, and they'll pull up a map of Alexander's Macedonian Empire and a map of the Mongol Empire, and I've actually seen people post measurements of the empire as a "gotcha, the Mongol Empire was 3cm larger!" (Not an actual fact) to win their argument.

Many of the members of this subreddit will tell you that this is an incredibly silly way of using maps, and there is a ton wrong with this anecdote I just presented. I wouldn't even know where to begin with that particular comparison, maybe that Genghis Khan wasn't even alive at the zenith of the Mongol Empire? But it goes much deeper than even that. The Mongol Empire at the time of Genghis Khan and by the death of Mongke are quite different in many ways, and also quite the same in other ways. I would also talk about how some of the maps include the vassalized regions such as the Rus Principalities and then one might assume that this is a direct region of the Empire. Like I said....I don't even know where to begin, that's how much is wrong with that train of thought.

With that said, I would encourage you or anyone else that likes to look at maps to continue to do so. There's absolutely nothing wrong with that, I myself am a fan of maps. And then if you find/see something on a map that interests you, then you might go ahead and read about it and go down a rabbit hole, or perhaps find yourself back here asking this very subreddit why on some maps the Holy Roman Empire looks like one country containing Germany, northern Italy, etc and then on some maps it looks like someone spilled a bag of Skittles in the middle of Europe.

Lastly, and maybe I'm being a PITA here; however, the title of the video is misleading as well. The title is "the history of Africa" and it's a time-lapse of maps. A better title might be something along the lines of "maps of Africa" or something like that. Even titling it "countries of Africa through history" would be misleading as our concept of a Nation vs the concept of a Nation in a different era is different. History is the study of people, not the lines drawn in the sand.

So, after all this running around, I should probably answer your question. Is there any value in these videos? Sure there is! It depends what you're looking to get out of it.

If they are actually based on good information (which seems unclear), such maps can be useful at get a sense for the political diversity and flux of a region over time. I don't use videos, but I have used websites showing, for example, the changes in the extent territory of the Roman Empire, and the political shifts in Europe during the Medieval period, as ways of illustrating pedagogically that periods that students frequently think of as static and unchanging were really quite complicated and shifting. Territory mapping is not the only way to do that, of course, and not always even the best indicator of that (the USA's borders have not changed much in a century, yet it has been anything but static), but it can help with that.

So they could have some value, sure, if augmenting other information. They are not "history" per se, but they are a data visualization that can be used to get a sense of historical trends, and could cause the reader to ask historical questions ("what's happening there?"), and for me that is what a good historical data visualization ought to do.

I don't think they're as bad as those useless "racing bar charts" graphs that are all over YouTube at the moment, which are harder to read than a simple line graph and typically change the scale so much that you can't actually see trends despite their animated appearance.