It is always hard to argue about the definition of Terms of Service while actually appealing the strike itself.
The pattern matched a definition of some sort and the punishment is to disable features on the platform for the punished account.
I agree that it is a ridiculous and very narrow sighted decision in this case, otoh those people are paid for cases per hour and rather have the punishment hit too many accounts than too few. Why? Because the next case might argue that there are other videos with similar content that were never punished albeit reported for doing the same. Blocking a feature for 3 months isnĀ“t the end of the world, but removes the foundation for bad actors to argue on. Not the worst outcome from the perspective of a paid community moderator, ridiculous when looked at in detail, anyhow, the definition of TOS for the individual user is probably impossible to argue on with the moderators. You would need a petition or other leverage to actually do something about it at a higher instance.
Therefore the membership duration or amount of subscribers of the channel has a lower priority than most might think, i mean the biggest channels made huge mistakes / tested the borders and that caused lots of problems to the platform. Those were imho more or less trolling by personality / type of channel, and will probably continue to do so, but no one measures that.
Those cases also mean that these factors do not help with the decision, or have special set of rules above a certain amount of subscribers/membership duration/amount of videos.
My biggest concern about the commercial aspect of youtube is that creators are more or less employees (somewhat dependent in a similar fashion), without being called so, without the duties, but also without the associated rights.