[hknd]

Apparently Blender had more than 2 years to sign an updated contract - a contract which every partner had to sign to comply with updated legal regulations. Their existing contract would not work anymore (legal reasons?).

The Blender team never did that, and also never reacted to any youtube support mails.

[natch]

That doesn't map onto the Blender account of what happened.

They said YouTube was requiring them to enable ads, but the ads checkbox was grayed out. Among other issues. Not that they wanted to enable ads on a not for profit site. But just taking this one issue, it's not clear how they could have possibly complied with Google's requirement, when Google keeps the checkbox UI element grayed out and unchangeable.