The excess and non-obvious battery drain that can come from plugins is probably a large part of their reasoning. Fortunately, because of the openness of Chromium, you can install browsers like Kiwi browser that support extensions. Even Firefox only barely supports extensions right now on mobile.
Firefox has support for a lot of extensions but they removed most of the support now which is a shame. It allowed me to play YouTube on the background, a feature that make people actually pay YouTube premium music.
I wonder if there's a similar extension for kiwi? Basically it just nerds to disable the page visibility and full-screen API + some tweaks
just install "New pipe" from f-droid, it really rocks. Allows you to play videos in background, download video or audio - practically everything. The only issue is that it sometimes breaks when youtube changes its protocol
That's after Fenix release... before that' there was plenty of supported plugins. It's only a matter of time when other plugins will support new UI. As for Chromium, I'm more than sure the battery issue is just a nice excuse to toss ad blockers out of the window.
Kiwi browser has backported them and brave browser is currently merging the kiwi browser changes. Only a matter of time before this get on the radar of Edge too