Yeah. I've basically concluded that YouTube is either going to have to A) be replaced by something else with a lot less censorship or B) remove all advertisements, charge a $5/year subscription for access to more than 5 videos a month, or C) come up with some other non-advertising way of monetizing that I haven't thought of.

Case in point, as long as YouTube is beholding to the wims of advertisers, free speech is a dying thing on youtube. The same thing goes for how they are handling copyright strikes etc. They should be taking an aggressive stance to crack down on people who abuse the reporting system (e.g. ban an IP if it has X false reports, use the content ID system to actually detect whether it is fair use and whitelist those cases, which is easy to detect because it's based literally on how long the borrowed portion of the video is), instead of just assuming every report is 100% legit.