By proxy, in part. But my understanding is that they took away anything that was unverified, meaning a lot of amateur or reuploaded stuff probably disappeared, not necessarily just what was exploitative.
There were millions of hours of unverified footage, I assume that was the main reason the site became so big. You cant just remove all of it and expect to stay the leader, especially with the competition in this space
I've seen a tonne of comments on reddit complaining that they took "the good stuff" away.