Why on earth would Youtube let them keep the money, vs putting it in escrow until a complaint has a chance to be responded to and the dispute is resolved?
(Other than "it's the easiest thing to do and they can get away with it")
(Other than "it's the easiest thing to do and they can get away with it")
So you can confirm that you did lose ad revenue because of the claim and really are just stuck until somebody steps in and reverses it? Or is it as described in the YT terms linked in another comment?
If yes to the former, that's horrifying.
I've heard countless horror stories of creators ending up in Content ID hell and losing huge amounts of revenue. Whatever systems YouTube has to try to make this work, they obviously don't, not in practice, and real people are being hurt by copyright trolls like this one.
One thing I have no recourse for is that there are now incredibly intrusive pre-roll ads running on the video and annoying my viewers, where there shouldn't be any. No amount of escrow is going to make up for that problem.
What you can do is release your content as music (e.g. your channel intro music or similar) through a music distributor that offers Content ID services, and claim it on yourself. Then it becomes a revenue share, so instead of stealing 100% of your revenue, a fraudulent claim only takes 50%. This is, no joke, legitimately a thing people have done.
I see in a sibling comment/reply that you say you weren't monetizing your videos, and that now there are pre-roll ads on them that you don't want, and there's no way to undo that fact right now. I agree those are bad things, but those issues are separate from the one to which you are replying, which is about who gets the monetization revenue that accrues during a dispute.