The YouTube quota application had been sitting with Google since 3 October. On the morning of the 6th the reviewer wrote back with one request: a screen recording of the complete workflow, step by step, due in seven business days.
The problem with the recording
The submission had been honest when it was written. It said the tool fetched creator episodes from YouTube with yt-dlp and set a thumbnail on every upload. Both were true on the 3rd and neither was true by the 6th. Downloads had been switched off behind a setting two days earlier and Shorts covers had just moved to a by-hand upload in Studio. A recording of the tool as it was would contradict the form, and a form corrected to match a feature that was merely switched off would invite the obvious question.
The morning
On the owner’s instruction in the pull quote, four pieces of work ran in parallel the same day: a draft reply to the reviewer with a recording checklist and narration; the quota form, README, and diagrams corrected to the code as it stood; a Published tab in the app so covers can be redrawn from the videos already up; and a way to point the app at a fresh data folder and a fresh sign-in, so the recording starts from a clean install rather than the owner’s live setup. Creator-supplied files became a campaign source in the same change.
The afternoon
Then the owner went further. The tool must have no way to download from YouTube at all, not even behind a switch. The setting, the free-form source links, the creator feeds, discovery, the About page that read from them, their commands, endpoints, and options UI were all removed: thirty-seven files and about 3,650 lines. Old configuration keys load with one warning and are ignored. What remains is campaign sources only: files on disk, or files hosted elsewhere fetched with the YouTube extractors excluded. A campaign link that points at YouTube is held and never fetched. The historic tables of creators and feeds stay as history.
The reply to Google can now say the path was removed, which is a shorter sentence than “disabled by default.”
The recording itself
Two beats were added at the owner’s agreement so the reviewer sees the write side as well as the read side: a real edit of a video’s description from the app, and a real unscheduling of a test upload, which deletes it. The clean run needs one creator file pushed through the whole pipeline and a publish scheduled a day or two before the recording. The deadline is 15 October.