I've noticed a ton of crypto scams on YouTube recently, many of which are using the names of legitimate channels (like SpaceX), re-posting content from those channels and promoting scams – usually in the form of "send me [Elon Musk, Jeff Bezoz, etc] BTC, and I'll send you 2x back".
It seems reasonable to expect one or two of these to slip through the cracks now and then, but over the past few months, I've had YouTube "recommend" these to me, again and again, multiple times per day. I've often reported them as spam, only to have YouTube recommend the exact same video to me a few minutes later. I don't know anyone who would fall for the scams in the videos, but they've become so common now that it's getting really annoying.
You can't tell me that they're too difficult to distinguish from legitimate content. Any human being or half-decent algorithm would be able to catch these with no trouble at all (heck, I could write a couple of regular expressions that would do the trick and have 0 false positives), which leads me to wonder: why is YouTube promoting these videos? At this point, it feels like they must have some incentive not to shut them down, because it would require deliberate effort to have any form of spam control while also somehow letting these through.
Am I the only one noticing this?
Of course I can tell you that! :)
Abuse is an adversarial and dynamic problem. A simple regex will never solve the problem for more than a very short time period. Sometimes such short term fixes are called for, since they'll buy you the time for something more principled. But they cannot be the solution forever, because the abusers will adapt. The more different variants you end up blocking, the more likely it is that they somehow interact and produce serious FPs.
And then you've got a PR mess on your hands with people complaining about how "Jeff Bezos is being censored by YouTube". Abuse is pretty thankless that way: nobody ever sees your successes, only your failures, and it's all a job of balancing the two.
What you actually want for fighting bulk spam (rather than other forms of abuse) is robust signals that are broadly useful rather than specific to one campaign.
As for your actual question, I haven't actually been seeing this in my recommendations (but then again, I don't have anything related to cryptocurrency or Elon Musk in my recommendations). Maybe this isn't actually as widespread a problem as you're suggesting? To put it bluntly, perhaps cryptocurrency is an area where the legit content is basically indistinguishable from scams.