YT has been known to remove selfrepair videos or demonization of said videos.
I'm not at all convinced there is any large scale love for YouTube as far as US policy goes.
I really think YouTube like a lot of tech companies will often just take the path of least resistance and say:
"Well that's a lot of DCMA complaints ... just ban'm if our magic script says to, whatever."
It seems like maybe favoritism to another big company, but maybe is just more a reflection of a crappy process and a tech company habit of just letting some magic formula decide and avoiding any extra time / resource consuming process.
Not to say I don't think it doesn't happen as far as some corporate to corporate pressure goes, but it's hard to know.