YouTube for years now has been doing stuff like this, long before Brandon ever showed up. I'm a daily YouTube watcher, and I follow the news and opinions of the platform. Ever since their current CEO came on, she has turned YouTube into one big profit scheme. She has made countless rules demonetizing many creators for just cussing. YouTube Kids has demonetized countless videos that were not, and never were made for kids, but for some reason YouTube made it that way. The creators never saw a dime, but YouTube did. It's all a fantastic money scheme.
Right now, there is a huge saga of self harm and drama going on on YouTube right now via the channel, Nickakado Avocado. He started his YouTube career as a young, healthy vegetarian, but after getting famous on YouTube for eating large meals, he went haywire and would make videos where he would order 25 happy meals and eat them all for views. He has gained so much weight just over the past few years, that his health has plummeted. However, his videos are very, very popular because people watch this train wreck of a human being devolve into an unhealthy blob. A few months ago, several popular, but not as popular as Nick YouTubers started making videos criticizing his behavior. These videos made it big surprisingly and people would go onto Nicks YouTube channel and leave a dislike out of protest basically. This started a chain reaction that led people to do the same to YouTubers like Logan Paul, several Tik Tok creators, and multiple other famous channels. YouTube panicked, because they were losing money on some of their biggest money makers. So they took away the button, so where as previously Nicks video would have 906K likes and 1.2M dislikes, now all you see is the 906K likes and people who aren't familiar with the channel, stick around and watch because they don't see the imput on how many people disliked the video. YouTube gets its money, and viewers are left without a way to express their dislike of a certain creator or video.