I found this video claiming that the Communist party made simplified characters as a preparation for the Cultural revolution's removal of the four olds. The comment section strongly disagrees, yet the video has many likes. Is the video satire? Or is there any truth to these claims?
Yeah, no.
China Uncensored is satire, though it's not really obviously satire all the time. I hadn't seen that one.
Anyway no. The Communist party first of all did not create simplified characters. They were already in use as vernacular forms that, while not generally printed in newspapers and books, were quite common among the average person. The codification of simplified characters that the CCP instituted was a continuation of simplification efforts already started by the KMT in the 30s. Romanisation, simplification, language policy, pretty much everything the PRC did with language was stuff that Nationalist China had been pushing for, and much of it was stuff that was already under way in the Late Qing, prior to the Xinhai Revolution that topped the dynasty.
Aside from that, simplification was 100% a push for improving literacy. It went along with earlier efforts to shift the written language away from Classical Chinese and toward a more vernacular way of writing.
It also wasn't the only effort to simplify. In Japan there are shinjitai characters 新字體, which are also used in Taiwan, a simplification that is similar to but not exactly the same as the simplifications used in the PRC. Singapore also switched to simplified characters, but later than China did. On top of that, the PRC tried once more to simplify in the 1970s, introducing a whole set of characters like 仃 for 停, in order to further improve literacy. This is commonly called the Second Round Simplification scheme.
However, unlike the simplifications that were codified in the PRC in the 1950s, the Second Round characters were new inventions and not things people were already using. For this reason, the efforts failed, and a few years after they started teaching 2RS characters in the schools, the whole thing was called off and the effort abandoned.
The PRC didn't create simplified characters as we know them today. The PRC wasn't the thing that instigated simplification efforts. Simplification was not intended to distance people from the Classics, and in reality there aren't that many characters which are substantially different in simplified form compared to their traditional counterparts.