> Heck, they could do this even if they weren't against the content, all for the purpose of having the content removed or otherwise censored

But that's just it, I'm suggesting that legal content is never censored, merely that the monetization is proportional to the controversy, because advertiser skittishness is the real problem causing censorship on these free platforms. So brigading to raise the controversy score would move its ad revenue to a lower tier, but it wouldn't get removed.

Perhaps brigading would become a problem, but you leave it to the person whose channel was impacted to request a manual review if they suspect brigading. The review requirements have now shrunk dramatically.

There may be ways to abuse this too, but I think the spirit of this approach is right.