Unfortunately there are worst problems than spam. As you know our audience can be very young because it overlaps with Roblox and Minecraft. I recently read this article about Roblox, and was very happy that I took the decision of disabling private messages: https://thebearcave.substack.com/p/problems-at-roblox-rblx.
YouTube works perfect without private messages, and I assume our platform will also still be fun without it.
For me, the benefit of private messages is small relative to the abuse to minors that could happen. I’ll see how we can still do personal communication without it being private.