YouTube is not advertised as free, at least nowhere I could find.
It is considered free by lot of uninformed users. Lot of Youtubers, both budding and established, don't know the real consequence of being at the mercy of Google, that they could be thrown out of YT at the whims of Google.
And yet, Google gets very good prices for servers from OEMs. Instead of terminating people without saying a word, and then stonewalling them, they could've just demanded payment for the service.
YouTube Premium allows you to pay for the service.
They build their own servers. They are an OEM.
No, they buy them from Quanta and Supermicro
Who are you talking about? This policy isn't even in effect yet. The accounts they have terminated were for different reasons, and payment wouldn't have fixed it.