Seems like a story they spun with cherry-picked data to justify the removal of the dislike count.

If that was truly their primary concern, why wouldn't they limit the scope of the change to smaller creators? Could it be that they were looking for a post-hoc justification for a desired policy change?

Would you trust YT to define what a "small creator" is? It opens the door to other policies being applied only to "small creators" as well, and I don't personally like that thought

They already apply different rules to small creators. For instance, you must have 1000 subscribers and 4000 hours of watch time per a year in order to monetise videos.

That's not even close to what "small creator" would mean on YT

My point was that your slippery slope argument was a bit bonkers because YouTube already has a mechanism to impose varying rules on channels based on size.

They already do that. They don't pay creators at all who have less than 1000 subscribers and 4000 watch hours in the past year.

You also cannot have comments on videos that feature or target children

That's a response to a legal requirement

Couldn't smaller channels be getting hit by more dislikes because videos produced by smaller channels are actually just plain bad?

People who are just getting started on YouTube tend to have poor production quality and editing skills compared to established channels. That might have been acceptable in YouTube's early days when there were no standards, but now we're at a point where we've all seen thousands of videos on YouTube, and we all collectively expect high quality content.

Seems quite natural that smaller channels that are just getting started by people who are still learning will be disliked more often than large channels. Hardly a valid reason to eliminate the dislike button.

It sounds like you're very much predisposed to believing that all press releases are 100% truthful -- and you would never consider that they might be intentionally misleading.