You are spot on here. I encountered a short viral video on YouTube the other day which used the dislike removal to their advantage. It was a clickbait titled video with millions of views, and oddly there were only two supporting comments that had several thousand likes. The rest of the comments that probably called out the video being clickbait were obviously deleted. Usually I'm able to parse the comments quickly to see what the video is really about, then navigate somewhere else, but not this time... I watched until the end.