Here is some of that modern scholarship to back up your assertion:
Hugh Kennedy, The Great Arab Conquests - Chapter 3
In many ways acceptance of Muslim rule was the result of Muslim policy towards the enemy: it was almost always preferable to surrender to the invaders and to make terms and pay the taxes than to resist to the last. The Islamization and Arabization that followed conquest over the next two or three centuries would not have occurred if political conquest had not already succeeded, but they were not a direct and inevitable consequence of that conquest. Instead, it was a gradual, almost entirely peaceful result of the fact that more and more people wanted to identify with and participate in the dominant culture of their time.
Hugh Kennedy, The Great Arab Conquests - Chapter 12
As we have repeatedly seen, the Muslim conquerors put little or no pressure on the recently subjected populations to convert to Islam. Any attempt at compulsory conversion would probably have provoked widespread outrage and open hostility. As it was, the Muslim authorities established working relationships with the heads of the churches and other religious institutions that were now in their power. Conversion when it came was partly the result of fiscal pressures, the desire to escape the hated poll tax, but also because conversion provided an opportunity to escape from existing social constraints and to become a part of the new ruling class. Being a Muslim had always been essential for anyone who wanted a career in the military. By the tenth century, and before in some areas, it had become very difficult to have a successful career in the civil bureaucracy without becoming a Muslim. Attraction, not coercion, was the key to the appeal of the new faith.
Hugh Kennedy, The Early Arab Conquests - Chapter 12
According to the ecological thesis, the early Caliphs were merely riding the tiger of the expansion of the Arab peoples, over which they had little real control, at least at the outset. It is for this reason that proponents of the ecological thesis often prefer to speak of the “Arab conquests”, rather than the “Islamic conquests.” The view that the conquests were essentially more “Arab” than “Islamic” was partly rooted in the observation of an undeniable fact, that the conquests were not carried out primarily to secure the religious conversion to Islam of the conquered populations, at least beyond the Arabian peninsula. For, as is well known, the conquerors were content to collect tribute from non-Muslim religious communities outside Arabia that tendered their submission, and to leave them free to continue in their former faiths.
Fred Donner, The Byzantine and Early Islamic Near East - Chapter 7
The most important point I would like to stress, as you've already alluded to, is the Caliphate existed at all in the first place through cooperation with and tacit approval of the people they conquered. The tax codes they instilled were more often than not favorable to what was in place just prior, and in the case of the Levant and surrounding areas the Muslim conquests can even be seen as a 'liberating force' for the native people, in that it freed up native churches in the region from the oppressive religious policy of the Orthodox Byzantine state.
There is no way the Caliphate can hold itself together let alone thrive for centuries if it was some evil oppressive entity holding down its territories with force and violence, and not one that existed with the complacency and support of the people it ruled over. As is the case in any state.
This video and mindset it eschews is wholly reductionist, ignorant, and as you best put it, a simplistic political bastardization of complex history. Comparing the rise of the Caliphate, or even more hilariously the rise of Islamic states in the Mediterranean basin ever in the history of time, with the crusades...it's simply comparing apples to oranges.