FWIW, the audits were definitely being performed by humans, we saw the screenshots and some notes. The triggers for audits were likely automated.

Not a FB story, but I once had an innocuous profile image on a Google side-account get flagged and automatically restricted from public view. I requested human review and it was manually approved. The next week it got flagged again; same process, reapproved. This kept happening every week until 5 times total; I kept going just to see how long would it take them to stop, as I didn't really care about the image or even the account.

Long time after I'd last used that account, I logged-in again and, you guessed it, the image was flagged. Requested yet another review, approved. Was it really that hard for them to trigger human reviews before restricting content that had already been reviewed?

Hard? No.

Beyond their interest in doing, or their (low, low) budget to do at scale? Yes.