Come on, I'm trying not to dismiss your perspective just because it sounds a bit conspiratorial, but this is not convincing. Are you saying the YouTube execs (or whoever is leaning on them) are just acting emotionally with no strategy?
There is absolutely a strategy - there is a particular point of view they favor, and anything counter to it is removed.
Dislikes are embarrassing to, for lack of better terminology, their pet causes. Simply disabling them on certain videos or channels calls even more attention to them - so why not just remove them entirely.
The only thing surprising to me is that it took them this long.
It doesn't need to be that dislikes are embarrassing to their pet causes. There were a few instances where business partners would, e.g., post an ad campaign that got so many dislikes the dislike ratio entered the news cycle. I'm sure google gets pressure from their business/ad partners when that goes down.
What a silly conspiracy theory. If the wanted to hide embarrassing downvotes on certain videos, they'd just remove those downvotes, not the entire feature.
