This was different, admittedly. Their account got session jacked and taken over by a crypto scamming farm. Google was in the right to shut down the account until it could get resolved.
The fact people can get session jacked by Google, though, is still wild. Linus explained that their access control granularity is woefully underdeveloped, especially for such a large company.
Still, the way they handle it is extremely bad. It takes a long time to get the account re-instated and they just take down the whole thing in the meantime. What they should do is make the account read-only and if it was taken over by a malicious actor then just rollback to a previous state asap. For accounts with millions of followers they should have emergency contacts and a process that resolves this within less than 24h. These Youtube channels generate serious revenue that easily would justify the costs.
That's just insane. Imagine Mastercard or Visa shutting down card payments for Amazon.com randomly without anyone with half a sense doing a proper review. No circuit breaker in place to stop automated takedowns of huge accounts.
Google and especially Youtube seem to be run in a reckless, careless and incompetent way in this regard. Similar to Youtube seemingly being uninterested in solving the huge comment scam problem. I don't buy that the company that successfully filters out billions of spam messages in Gmail can't detect these really obvious spam/scam comments on Youtube. It's just baffling.
Google just doesn't care about you - regardless of your size.