Sorry, I misread your Q. I was speaking of comments. Hadn’t noticed that notifications had gone too. A while back, YT had a lot of problems with trolls & pedophiles. Going to guess this is also related to that problem!!!

Looking at the Wikipedia page on the COPPA act lists one of the conditions of compliance as “Operators are prohibited from conditioning a child’s participation in an online activity on the child providing more information than is reasonably necessary to participate in that activity.”
Maybe providing notifications on new content could be considered a violation of that and give YouTube run ins with the law already they don’t want to risk finding out.

You also can’t save them to a list to view later.

‘Cause little kids don’t know how to.

@KRD: I still don’t see anything wrong with teaching your kid to turn on notifications for new videos.

Now that I think about it, you do have a point @luigirovatti. Maybe Youtube thought it would be a better idea.