The law is broken and needs to change.
The complainant submits a complaint, the receiver submits a counter notice, youtube is granted immunity to put the content back up after 14 days (unless the complainant initiates a lawsuit within that timeframe) and the complainant has no recourse but to take the alleged-infringer to court.
Technically, submitting a copyright claim with blatantly false information is perjury, but your only recourse as the victim is to beg a prosecutor to take the perpetrator to court over it. There is no civil remedy for false DMCA takedowns.
As far as I am aware, not a single person has ever been convicted of perjury because of information supplied in a DMCA takedown.
That said, there are also civil penalties for false takedown notices under 512(f), which I believe have been successfully litigated. Still, the effort vs reward in litigating them is almost never worth it.
The claimant should require some skin in the game to prevent this sort of nonsense, maybe a bond or surety of some kind held in the US?
This is of most impact to channels big enough for somebody to treat it as a full time job, but not so big that it will ever be worth YouTube’s time to provide them any level of service.
I guess, as long as they comply with the takedown, they feel sufficiently safely harboured, and don't feel compelled to implement the other part of the process since like what are you going to do, sue youtube to force them to host your video and run ads on it?
Judges sometimes take pride in interpreting a law to mean something other than what the words say. Let alone the risks of interactions with other parts of the law. Amateur understanding doesn't count for much.
Of course, even being able to DMCA counter-notice isn't really a help, because you're just telling the claimnant to sue. You even have to dox yourself. What people want is to just not have to deal with copyright in these specific cases where there is no element of copyright being infringed.
The relative success of anti-SLAPP statues and motions would indicate that there is at least some empathy for "not forcing people who have not committed a crime to prove that they haven't committed a crime".