This guy is as wholesome as wholesome can possibly be and he was still demonetized. Wears suits, is cordial with his viewers, doesn't curse... what more could YT want?

HOW? This guy is basically a 1950's white-picket fence gentleman. I think we are seeing a concerted effort to attack major YT channels into leaving YT.

My pet conspiracy theory regarding Youtube is that Google wants to pivot it to compete with Netflix and Amazon, and replace user-submitted content with exclusive, licensed content that might actually make money.

But Google doesn't want to risk the PR nightmare of admitting that they no longer want 99% of their userbase poisoning the well for the 1%, so they use pretexts like demonetizing content to encourage them to go elsewhere.

It's probably not true, but Google either seems to be fantastically inept or malicious at this point, when it comes to their interactions with content creators and their UX.