"Some people will abuse it, therefore no-one should have it" is a strongly growing mentality in these days, and woe betide us if we keep pursuing it deeper without proper consideration for each case.
It also lets them avoid a lot of difficult decisions wrt policing speech which is something youtube has established a long history of being awful at.
Anyway, I know you're not apologizing for them. Google already has 125k+ employees. They could hire 10k+ more, it wouldn't really matter.
This is such a bad look, what were they thinking?
All adtech and most social media is both abusive and socially destructive, but it's profitable enough for the Right people that there's no serious prospect of it being shut down.
The road network sees a lot of abuse (e.g. transportation of illegal property, impaired driving, simply allowing criminals to move freely) but it's too socially useful to shut down.
Fear of abuse is just a cover for withdrawing, or failing to provide, services for other, unstated, reasons.