Yeah, the entire process of dealing with exceptions (or indeed, anything that involves human judgement) is atrocious at YouTube, and has been for many years.

jwz wrote about this years ago as well (and there are many more stories): https://www.jwz.org/blog/2014/10/youtubes-joke-of-a-fair-use...

That being said, I feel too many people fail to appreciate the problems YouTube is facing and are too quick to simply shout "censorship!"