> it’s the law

Where?

Other sites keep the metadata (and even allow new comments on) deleted posts.

GDPR text asks to delete all data for which the user withdraws consent to share. IANAL but that seems telling.

When a user asks to delete a video it’s deleted, with it goes the title and description.

We've always been at war with Eastasia.

I love me a random 1984 reference… care to explain what’s wrong with honouring user requests to delete their data?

In my opinion, once the video is added to my list, at least the name should become my data.

Also I seriously doubt that all those missing videos were requested to be deleted by the user. I'd be willing to bet that 90% of them were taken down by youtube's ridiculous and mostly broken takedown bots. There should be consequences for frivolous takedowns.

The idea that all or most of these missing videos are due to GDPR deletion requests is completely incorrect. They are almost all from spurious copyright takedown requests. YouTube has no legal obligation to automatically honor these, and it certainly doesn't have to delete all associated metadata. Framing this issue as an instance of YouTube being respectful of their users data is ridiculous.