Clearly you wouldn't need to review all of it. You could use AI to identify things for review (as opposed to remove them), limit it to people with a number of downvotes or views. Hell, you could just pay people to handle the reviews/escalations/appeals.
Although, Google totally could afford it. It would cost less than 2.5% of their profits to pay US minimum wage to review every video.
So you think employing those hundreds of thousands of workers would incur no office space costs, no IT system costs, no management, no service staff, no HR, no payroll, no recruitment, no training. Wow. And your talking about Google profits, but YouTube is a business itself that needs to make money. Why does the rest of Google need to subsidise it?
I'm not sure, but I don't think the answer is that it obviously won't materially change YouTube's profitability.
They have a monopoly on search, that they use to censor any competing video hosting. If they go and start censoring their own service too, this is a very serious problem.
If the profitability of Youtube is on the table, then so should be antitrust, and Google should not be allowed to own it.
Even more important from Google's point of view is it was the way to push Chrome to dominance. And a way to keep it there ahead of any potential competitors.
Which is valuable because of the data and ability to block ad blockers. That is, Google's ad ecosystem.
