> I can totally understand it in cases where the alleged offense is something like uploading copyrighted content to YouTube, where there is clear evidence and an audit trail saying "Here's what you uploaded, here's when you uploaded it, and here's the point where the rights holder registered it in ContentID, etc"

Probably not the best example. There are countless reports of ContentID falsely claiming copyright violations. I personally had a gaming video muted for violating some copyright by some company I never heard of when the only thing playing were ingame sound effects (no music).

> something like uploading copyrighted content to YouTube

Even that ain't clear cut. For example, if I upload a song to YouTube that's a remix of another song, and someone else uploads their own remix and registers it with ContentID, there's a risk that my remix will be flagged as "infringing" upon the other remix even though it is not a derivative of the other (and the other does not hold the copyright on the shared samples that triggered the ContentID detection).

I happen to know this because one of my own songs got erroneously flagged for this exact reason. Thankfully I was able to reach out to the company that submitted the ContentID registration on behalf of the "original" author, and they were able to rescind it (uploading remixes of songs to their ContentID management platform was in violation of their terms of service, so it was an open-and-shut case); else, I would've had to risk my own account getting flagged to death, since going through YouTube's appeals process would've been the only other option.

I've had copyright claims against Creative Commons music before. The automated systems are trash.