I remember thinking about the same thing... It is actually possible to get a pretty smooth motion blur, by just editing the parameters in the super secret setting's text file, and adding it to a resource pack. I did this a while back, thinking it would be nice, but trust me, it just gets annoying after a while. It looks good on video, but I just found myself not enjoying it.
Anyway, the way YouTubers usually get the motion blur effect is by recording at a high frame rate, and then resampling the video, so that the video kind of compresses something like 120fps into a 30fps video.