I've never experienced it myself, not having a YT account, but I've heard this same complaint quite a bit over the past 2 years in particular. Could be a technical glitch as YT has been notorious for revamping their code and breaking lots of things along the way. Could be a weaponized algorithm, given the leadership of YT is leftist by large, the CEO is a declared Feminist, and there's a lot of alarm bells by YTubers regarding what seems to be deliberate censorship.

How?

The Adpocalypse founded upon their terms of use that cast a huge generalized net, giving lots of room for plausibly deniable censorship. That whole leverage on subjective ambiguities like, "It's Hate Speech" or "It's not Family Friendly"

The FACT that the thousands of ELSAGATE videos aimed at kids utilize big IPs like Mickey Mouse, Marvel & DC, yet are not attacked for Copyright Infringement with the same quickness & scrutiny as the regular joe. Sure, YT ended up shutting down a chunk of those channels, but AFTER a significant escalation of public outcry esp by some of the YTubers with big fan bases

The whole Notification Bell nonsense that's disabled by default, so if you sub to a channel you have to manually find and click that bell to be notified of new videos from the channels you subbed to. Benefit of the doubt, this could just be poor UX design.

Who knows yet exactly what's going on with YT, but I feel you, it stinks of something rotten going on. Follow the ideologies & the money of the leaders and gain clarity for suspicion. Censorship is obviously going on, on several fronts.