I spent the better part of 2 hours just to get everything up and running again and it's frustrating to know that you cannot easily contact anyone @ Google to ask for help.
Holy cow I had the same issue. Ended up having to just make a brand new one with a new name. It was a horrible experience.
A version on a beta channel had SMS permissions requested, but there was no way to get rid of it. You can never just delete a version of something, only replace it. But you couldn't 'replace' until you'd 'fixed' the problem of the SMS perms.
What they were asking for was a description of the fix, a login/password to view the fix, a video of the old and fixed versions in action and some checkboxes stating that I accepted the new SMS policy. Except... the existing versions didn't have any SMS functionality in the first place. There was no way to 'video' a fix for a problem that never existed.
But it was worse, and I forget exactly how. I could never get it to accept a new uploaded version because an existing version somewhere wasn't 'fixed'. I think this was part of it. There was a 'beta' channel version, and regular channel version, and each one wouldn't accept an update of a new version because there was still a 'broken' version on the account somewhere.
Truly a horrible experience.
I ended up fixing it eventually by somehow clearing all versions in alpha/beta channels and uploading a new fixed version without the SMS permission with increased version number multiple times, and then bubbling that up to production.
For reference, we only used READ SMS permission in this app to improve the phone number validation process so it was easy to remove, with the downside that now it is harder for our users (mostly over 45) because they have to switch to the SMS app and back to complete the validation. Our helpdesk has seen an increase in support calls about the validation process since then.
we only used READ SMS permission in this app
to improve the phone number validation process
[1] https://developers.google.com/identity/sms-retriever/overvie...
Remember how crazy it was back when "flashlight" was an app on your phone that you had to give the "camera" permission to this random crappy app because the lamp is built into the camera and so that's the permission needed?
The same is true for so many features in so many apps, why does this app say it needs permission to _make phone calls_ when it's actually just measuring 3G signal strength? Why does this other one want to "read and write files" when actually it just wants somewhere to store a 40 byte ID?
In some cases the answer is Android / iOS didn't create the right permissions to reflect what's actually needed. But in plenty of others the problem is app developers don't use what is offered because they found a "simple" way (often pasted from a 5 year old Stack Overflow answer) to achieve what they wanted.
This is completely normal for anything with Google.
There's too many videos for a manual process, so Youtube has to rely on algorithms and that's always going to be a broad brush.