I don’t know whether to be glad about this because of how horrifying YouTube’s spam problem is, or annoyed because it isn’t helping since their comments are what’s full of rampant fraud spam of every kind.

Honestly, the best thing YouTube could do to help protect users would be to shift to moderated comments only. If the video creator or their designated moderator doesn’t choose to explicitly show a comment, it should go in a black hole. Or even better, offer a service for a small fee relative to your channel’s revenue, which uses a Gemini flash model to approve on-topic comments. Creators can choose to invest either their time or their money, or just have no comments.