Personally I had very much opposite experience with Google Ads support. For the person who buy ads it's exceptional and with available phone support even if you only buy ads for $100. They can literally explain how every single thing work on their system, giving advice on how to improve campaigns or fix something.
It's very much opposite when it's come to AdSense, but again they don't really care when some webmaster lose his source of income since there will be other webmasters to replace him.
that's not true in my experience. the rep had no direct answer and sometimes it would take a couple days till they reached somebody that knows the answer. and for everything else that i asked that they did not know directly the answer was "it's algorithm, even when i found the answer later somewhere deep in forums or faq".
i have dealt with google europe, i even visited the offices in dublin but i do not have a confidence that they know the answer, most of them are there to try to convince you to try this new thing and incrase you budget.
> i have dealt with google europe, i even visited the offices in dublin
I guess I should be perfectly honest: ads is obviously no my specialization and I only worked with Google Ads for small businesses with quite a small budgets not more than $10000-$20000 a month.
So obviously my impression might be limited to quite superficial questions or problems. It's very much possible that if you work with something actually complex their support isn't anywhere as useful as it's for entry-level customers.
There are multiple perspectives here: the customer, the support engineer, the senior management, and more.
"Absolute certainty" aside, OP basically just said they saw the mountain from the base (only has the view of the volume of tickets pending in their queue) and most of it is in a cloud, they can't even see the top, it looked big, hard to drill, impossible to shave down to ground level. The "absolute certainty" confirms the point of view.
Senior management see it from above (see the big picture) and see total volume of work, a mathematical division based on resources, the value of each work area, which are core or not, where to focus more resources, and which parts to cut down because they set the end goal.
The customer sees the paid promise of a flat terrain. No mountain, no resources.
Now I don't expect the support engineer to know or care about more than what comes in their queue. That's their only job. But I do know management almost always sees support areas, especially for the "low value/impact" segments, as the best candidates for some savings when you have shareholders to please. Successful management will strike a balance between saving more money from cutting costs than they are losing by losing customers and image. Anything else is considered shortsightedness: they either leave money on the table, or they choke the business for short term gain.
In this particular case YouTube could solve the issues but they have deemed this not worth it. The amount needed to fix this is higher than the return so it can't be justified. Fixing one offs and high visibility cases is cheaper than eliminating the issue entirely.
It's very much opposite when it's come to AdSense, but again they don't really care when some webmaster lose his source of income since there will be other webmasters to replace him.