I have a good friend, or ahem, an Uncle who works there that often says....

"People are not just ruining [culture].... people are ruining [civilization] in general."

~ Adding to a quote that registered.  :)

I absolutely agree that it wouldn't entirely fix the issue but at least it would show that Youtube is taking action, and the type that makes the most sense. If they proliferate the idea that activists can point to unsavory commenters on videos, and Youtube will respond by removing the commenting option, it will be further abused and the content creators will suffer for no wrongdoing of their own (the guy who found the pedo comments was salty because he couldn't get his Youtube "career" off the ground even when doing weird videos of harassing random women. Tim Pool did a video on it).

My personal opinion is that this whole "police the internet" idea that's catching on is the new "The US needs foreign intervention to reduce dictatorships and oppression of the foreign populace" and will have roughly the same result. Not even drones bots can solve this problem without innocents being punished.

I realize to some the comment sections of Youtube and other sites are irrelevant or largely frowned upon but there's clearly a modest swath of individuals who want to voice their opinions who don't deserve to be silenced (pedophilia not withstanding), and my argument would be that removing this channel to voice one's opinion will lead to further problems in what is an already divided "society".

From what I've seen, Youtube are closing comments on entire channels that have nothing to do with kids. If a channel has one particular focus but maybe the owner is a parent and occasionally has their children in a handful of videos out of thousands, then the whole channel gets comments shut down, videos get demonetised and removed from suggested videos. Slowly killing off channels, sources of income and entertainment.

I think you missed the point by assuming the first sentence has nothing to do with the second.