[gruez]

>2. It is shady as fuck to not only make no announcement about the change, but make it difficult to even figure out what's happened

Source for this claim? The article doesn't make this accusation, and considering this is a B2B product that requires manual approval to use, I wouldn't be surprised if they sent out this as email rather than something to their blog. Searching for "YouTube Player for Publishers", it looks like their last mention of that product was in 2018, and it was only a passing mention.

[ghusto]

It's literally the title of the article: "YouTube quietly made some of its web embeds worse, including ours"

[gruez]

Seems like a stretch to extrapolate from one word in the title (ie. "quietly") to "shady as fuck to not only make no announcement about the change, but make it difficult to even figure out what's happened". The article even mentions that the author was not involved in discussions between the publisher and youtube[1]. This is like some engineer complaining about how AWS "silently" changed their enterprise terms, when he's not even in meetings between his company and the AWS account rep.

[1] >(I didn’t even really know about it until this links kerfuffle — if you listen to The Vergecast this week, you know our newsroom is firewalled from the business side of our company.)