I think you present some excellent ideas. And I would guess some of them depend on the reason for termination (although often the reason selected by some automated processes makes no sense).

In the OP's scenario, for instance, YouTube could have at least allowed his partner to export all the videos.

There are some definite easy wins to be made by players in this space that don't even involve them having to hire more humans.

Thanks! For the things that do require human review, I wonder what the best way is to scale that.

It actually might be a potential business opportunity. Gig economy social media moderation. Pay $50 and YouTube contracts out with a company for $40 to pay a subcontractor $30 to spend an hour reviewing your appeal and account history and making a recommendation.

It has an icky protection racket feel to it and would incentivize YouTube to be more aggressive in deactivating accounts. But... maybe it's less icky than advertising, selling your privacy for pennies, and permanently deleting your stuff?

And while the quality of random gig economy contractors would be pretty poor, it certainly could not be worse than no support at all as they are bound to make the correct determinations some of the time.

Maybe some kind of consensus protocol?