The unsealed court order wasn’t just fishing for a list of vague identifiers that could be winnowed down to a list of suspects and a follow-up warrant demanding actual identifying information on these ~30,000 YouTube users. No, it appears the feds led with the big ask, demanding names, addresses, phone numbers, and user activity for every viewer of these videos between January 1-8, 2023. AND(!!) it asked Google to provide IP addresses for all viewers who were not logged into (or did not possess) Google accounts.
That’s fucked
Google is an ad company first, and as long as that gravy train is flowing they’ll be fine. Their dominance as a search engine is just to maintain their monopoly on internet ads, not give customers a good searching experience, hence why sponsored links are the first thing to appear and count as a view in their analytics
IIRC this is how those Elon musk crypto livestream hacks worked on YouTube back in the day, I think the bad actors got a hold of cached session tokens and gave themselves access to whatever account they were targeting. Linus Tech Tips had a good bit in a WAN show episode