I'm not so sure about cutting the storage costs at this point. They likely soft deleted the content in order to preserve it for potential law enforcement needs or whatever else. Moving forward they will absolutely see a decrease in storage needs since uploads are so much more restricted
It's not even soft-deleted, it's just a "this content has been flagged for verification" UI message. The content is still available for download and/or streaming with other frontend clients, such as youtube-dl.
Hot-store is more expensive than cold-store. For law enforcement purposes, they can have it shipped out to magnetic tape and dropped in a dry cave somewhere.
