The way YouTube does copyright claims is actually an extra-legal process that's strictly harsher than the DMCA - so usually there is no DMCA claim to counterclaim on.

Additionally, strikes on accounts appear to be immutable and can seriously threaten a creator's revenue source so, while it sounds nice to encourage people to stand up for their rights, it's almost never in their interests to oppose the claim. Yes this absolutely is an issue where copyright owners can file baseless claims and assume they'll be obeyed anyways but trying to resist it as an individual is futile... honestly YouTubers need to unionize at some point and let their collective power force better enforcement rules for copyright violations.

This specifically has nothing to do with automation. The article clearly states that it was a manual take down initiated by a person.

Content ID plus an unsophisticated overworked "manual review" step may as well just be considered automated from a high level view.

Who's to say the "person" doing the manual review isn't just a Mechanical Turker?

YouTube does not make the DMCA counterclaim process available. Youtube give the copyright holder (or claimed copyright holder) who filed the original takedown the ultimate authority to process appeals themselves. (Which is horribly broken.)

According to the article it was manual rather than automation. That this was an intentional act to take this down.