Shadow Banning is very useful for spam bots. If you let them know they’re banned, they’ll just open a new account. But if YouTube keeps accepting their comments with a smile on its face before immediately tossing those comments into the shredder, it’ll take some time before the bot figures out what’s going on.
People want the CEO to keep his mouth shut instead of publicly demonstrating his disregard of the art form,
as well as pay artists that create actual music more, and people abusing the system (see the OP) less.