Yes, I see Youtube going deep into enshitiffication. On my Macbook this morning with a FF-dev edition it just stopped to work this morning. Don't know if it's related to the fact I tried to install an extension to "force H264" on my Ubuntu box. On the latter fans started to go crazy as soon as I open a single youtube tab lately and a quick research led me there.
Actually at this point the only thing that makes the good old aMule a bit less inconvenient to my own expectations are
- it's missing snippet previews
- it doesn't have as many resources on every topic out there.
I also had it stop working completely. I thought they finally wised up to my adblocker, but I decided to finally install that update I had been sitting on for a while and it just started working again
Probably just the typical nefarious activities of YouTube. Either "accidentally" driving users to switch browsers, or experimenting with circumventing ad blockers, or negligence in testing, or who knows what.
If they want the "Google has no browser monopoly!" claim, then they should be obligated to make their services work perfectly with the alternative, instead of subtly scheming and manipulating people.
One thing you can do is to use an invidious instance. Those don't support live streams and shorts, but at least you don't have to deal with the atrocious normal YouTube frontend.
Actually at this point the only thing that makes the good old aMule a bit less inconvenient to my own expectations are
- it's missing snippet previews
- it doesn't have as many resources on every topic out there.