[shadowgovt]

Indeed; I was speaking broadly, not in absolute categoricals, and my question should have read "Are they leaving large amounts of money or users on the table." My apologies for being unclear. Yes, every decision they make in both directions leaves nonzero money and users on the table.

At Google scale, one has to weigh the risk of false-positive and the risk of false-negative on a low-granularity feature like this, and the risk of error due to misconfiguration being blamed upon YouTube if it's turned into a high-granularity feature. Because the failure mode for YouTube if they false-negative something that is visible to students who should not have seen it (and generate a negative press cycle for themselves) is that schools choose to black-hole youtube.com instead of bothering with Restricted Mode at all. That's what was happening before they added the feature, and it's the reason Restricted Mode exists.