I don't see an apology, nor an indication that there will be corrective action towards whatever initiated this.
In my opinion, YouTube’s inconsistent moderation is intentional. It fosters learned helplessness in creators, causing them to stop contesting penalties and simply comply. The unpredictability of penalties leads to self-censorship, as creators try to avoid further punishment, even without understanding why their content is penalized. This fear of random consequences drives passive compliance and penalizes "wrong-think".
IME, even if you're "just" hosting a website for a car dealership and have a video showing a tour of the shop, it will end up being targeted. Misconfigured spiders hitting the video again and again and AGAIN, probably to harvest it for AI training, legitimate DDoS attacks just using videos as something efficient to cause you large bandwidth costs...
If you were to rebuild YouTube, aka not just hosting your own cat photos and videos like with a blog, but also the social element, it gets even worse. All the problems from above, plus you gotta deal with regular spammers and scammers now, plus PPV-porn spammers, PLUS all the CSAM spreaders who are constantly looking for new ways to host their shit in the clearnet.
You can't just go and run your own self-host these days, not if you are not prepared to deal with all sorts of abusive behavior yourself.
That said, I am not looking at it from content creator perspective at all, which is part of the problem, because I am relatively certain that Google does not do it either.
People do it all the time though, but maybe your point was more about self-hosting popular sites.
It's not like any specific platform created celebrities. People making this kind of content with these kinds of followings existed before. Someone like Bob Vila was the Jeff Geerling of 40 years ago. The difference is then you needed to win the blessing of a television studio. Today, you need to win the lottery of dumb luck to go viral and you still need the blessing of whatever opaque algorithms YouTube uses to surface specific videos. For whatever reason, people with channels feel like they're more likely to do that compared to getting their own television show, presumably because it's at least easier to publish something nobody will watch rather than trying to pirate broadcast your own stream on airwaves you don't have a license for.
What are YouTube's network effects? Discoverability and deliverability.
You can overcome the deliverability challenge with a CDN of your choosing.
The discoverability issue can be worked out by good SEO and POSSE[0] principles.
Yeah, it's not the same, but you own your media. Freedom costs money.
You can't/Don't want to pay? be subjected to Google.
This is still a free world. Free as in freedom, just not free as in free beer.
--
Oh wait! Google!
Well surely as an independent search engine with no desire to exhibit anti-trust practices, they do spend as much time developing algos for scraping for independent video.
And as a search engine, working with webmasters to provide easy scraping of metadata, and better integration into their search results.
And ranking it higher than youtube when sensible.
Right?