[superkuh]

Youtube is pretty much a monopoly at this point. It has no significant competition. So they can afford to have plenty of bugs and indeed their fight against general purpose computation and preventing people from watching youtube outside of their prescribed web applications and smartphone apps has lead to the introduction of many bugs even in the browser.

I used to use youtube in a browser because it just worked. It had lots of nice features compared to youtube-dl/yt-dlp. But since they've worked so hard to prevent the use of such tools even my browser based youtube is regularly freezing the video for ~5-10 second periods many times during a play now (on multiple computers/firefox, via multiple IPs).

Youtube tightening their grip has made the youtube.com website so bad that yt-dlp is now actually a better experience. Rather than just an awkward way to preserve things.