It is likely you use Chrome or a browser that uses Blink for its engine and the OP uses a non-blink browser like Firefox. I use Firefox and I can cofirm since the last few months Youtube usability borders on usable

They've also started to be really aggressive against VPNs. I've tried Private Internet Access, Mulvad and AirVPN and often I have to cycle through 5-15(!) servers before YouTube stops saying "sign in to confirm you're not a bot".

Discord has started to become absurdly aggressive with it too, to the point that they don't even let you load messages whilst logged in if you're on a VPN.

It really makes me feel like there will be an inflection point in a few years, where the internet is cleaved in two. You'll have the 'free' internet that is full of interesting stuff but also full of malware, spam and scams, and you'll have the squeaky clean corporate internet, basically a facsimile of WeChat's super-app, of which you'll only have access with a government ID. No VPNs or anti-fingerprinting allowed.

I use it on Firefox and Safari on Mac OS (mainly Safari), and it's been OK except it's started doing a thing where it blips a bit after roughly the first 1sec of video plays.

I wonder if being a YouTube Premium subscriber is also a factor here. I do pay for it so I don't see ads. But maybe the way ads are being served/injected has changed things for the worse for people that get them.

YT works pretty flawlessly for me with firefox on debian. What's the issue you're seeing?

I'm using Firefox.

I use Firefox with uBlock and besides a couple of times where video start was delayed by a few seconds it has been working as well as before.

Interesting. I use Firefox and it works flawlessly for me. I wonder if it's a computing power thing?

Yeah, big same here. It’s pretty frustrating, because I pay for YouTube premium, but cannot use my preferred browser. I have to use Chromium in order to have it work reliably. Doubly so considering it worked fine in Firefox for YEARS… until maybe six months ago?

It feels like something the FTC should be investigating, or perhaps a European equivalent, but I doubt it will.

I use Chrome and it's not good. They recently removed ability to force AV1 to only low resolution videos and as a result I had to disable HW acceleration in Chrome because accelerated AV1 decoding is broken on Steam Deck.