This could also be a pride thing for Youtube/Alphabet. For the past few years the Youtube Rewind video [0] has somewhat infamously gotten heavily downvoted, mostly I think as a reflection of how frustrated viewers are with Youtube and maybe Alphabet as well. I'm sure the executives feel some catharsis taking away an avenue for users to express that frustration.
Rewind is kind of old news. Now that time YouTube CEO Susan
Wojcicki received a Free Expression Award from an organisation
sponsored by YouTube[1] is more recent and something else
completely, ratio-wise. Currently at 56,502 dislikes vs 226
likes. Which is a ratio of over 250×.
My take on it is that there is a number of diverse creators on the platform, and many YT users see a very different set of creators. E.g. You might see creators X, Y, Z and I might watch A, B, C for different topics. So, when it comes time to rewind, you can't please everyone since you'll have to pick a subset of creators. And then those who didn't see their favorite creators will be saying things like "Where was creator J? I watched so many of their videos, and they have a billion views, etc." And they might dislike the video, because they feel not represented. So, in my mind, the YT way to do rewind would be to do a custom rewind for each person (but there's no technology to automatically make a high quality video like that today).
Of course, this is just my theory about a segmentation of the population. Then there are people with their own agenda, and will use the dislike button as a protest for other things. Then once it reaches some threshold, some people just like to hit the dislike button to see how far they can push it.
Disclaimer: These are my own views, and not of my employer.
[0]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YbJOTdZBX1g