Again it is in Google's (or YouTube's) best interest in doing what they do.. If I was them, honestly I would be doing the same. We have to step back and understand that this is a business for them, and they need to be making profit, profit comes from advertising/advertisers. If advertisers are not happy with the video content that their ads are running on, they will put out and profits will go down the drain.
YouTube gives us a platform to share our content for free, we don't pay them (unless you use their paid promos which is entirely different aspect), they let us post whatever we like to. In fact, they pay us (even though just a tiny fraction) if they run ads on our vids. So really, I don't see why they don't have the authority to decide which vids are OK to put ads on and which are not.
From our end, we just need to make sure we don't put out hate videos, or violence, or gore, etc. Try to mind our language, use proper titles and descriptions. Avoid click-baiting, trolling in comment replies, etc.
I'm not sure how the effect is on channel growth.