I think the email they sent freshjivetv sums up their guidelines pretty well. I don't think you're being misleading or anything, but... I don't know. Just remember, you CAN fix the issues and re-upload if they take it down.
It's become common for people to make videos that are totally unrelated to other YouTuber's but use those YouTuber's in their Tags to rank higher and possibly show up in the 'recommended for you' or 'what to watch next' sections of those Channels. I'm on my PC right now but on my Laptop I have all the tools I need to read Tags and other such Information on YouTube videos. The other day I came across a couple of channels that had tagged other YouTubers in their videos so I reported them because the tags had nothing to do with those YouTube videos . It was simply misleading/spam tags to game the YouTube algorithm. Those videos went down within the next 24 hours and at least one of those channels was terminated because of it. That's what is not fair, People gaming the system and getting away with it. I don't mean to sound as though I have some vendetta but I can't stand seeing people break YouTube's TOS and Guidelines just to make some extra money while all other content out there deserve's to have the same exposure. I bet if I went and looked at the tags of these channels you described they would be in violation of YouTube's TOS.
Maybe not an automated deletion process, but I believe with this volume of people who seem to be affected that they have an algorithm that flags videos that seem to have tags in the description and holds them for review. It doesn't make sense that all of these videos are suddenly being flagged by people for this sort of thing...the sort of thing (tags in description) that the casual viewer doesn't even know is a violation of TOS .
A competitor may indeed know that tags in the description are a violation and can easily go through all the videos on a channel to flag them.
Sure, but do you really think it's coincidence that this is all happening now? Are they going back to flaggings that happened months ago and acting on them? I doubt it. This would be something that would be really easy for Youtube to program an algorithm to recognize. They have all sorts of programs to recognize other forms of misuse.
I can assure you that you are wrong about that, actually. I know for a fact that they have an algorithm that actually checks the content of videos looking for certain skin tones that appear in abundance. The algorithm then flags the video for review for community guidelines violations (family safe content). This was explained to me by Youtube partner support after one of my videos got deleted. I can dig up the email if you'd like.
You are correct and I was imprecise as I was only referring to the tag violation thingy.