I think Youtube does this just to piss off people and make ad revenue off a whole crop of angry videos that are made.
It makes sense as a hypothesis, except that Youtube recently demonetized a wide cross-section of videos, including some from very large content creators. That probably cost them a lot more money than this single move will make them.
They did it for a few select videos that had tags like "rape" or "suicide".
Let me tell you, it's in Youtube's best interest to piss off the big stars who make a lot of money. The people who are large stars on Youtube can get professionally outraged over this and get millions of views, 55% of which goes to Google. Is it a terrible policy? Yeah. Will anything meaningful happen? No. Youtube is playing a delicate balance between pissing people off and making money off them vs having them actually leave.
They're playing people for saps and making even more money in the process. The most infectious virus on earth is anger.
