I also had mysterious issues with YouTube for a while, but it turned out to be a combination of a browser that was a mess (deleting the profile fixed the issue, even after all the add-ons came back) and a driver issue with hardware video decoding. These days I hear this a lot from people who have multiple ad blockers running, as only uBlock Origin is (still) enough to block ads on YouTube.
I also had someone solve the problem by manually lowering the MTU. This indicates a future network issue that is ruining the MTU discovery, but you can also try that again. I also saw this once with a disabled IPv6 configuration, where someone tried to disable IPv6 and the connections were constantly causing network errors.
Whether it’s your device or your ISP, there’s a lot you can do on the client side to fix YouTube issues. Unfortunately, this often results in 50% browser confusion and 50% Wireshark searching, but there’s always something that will make your life miserable.
The number of requests shouldn’t make a huge difference, as YouTube runs over QUIC/HTTP3/HTTP2 so all of these requests need to be handled simultaneously over the same connection. If you shut down 443/udp in your firewall, there may be a slight glitch, but the fallback usually takes milliseconds per page. All of these small requests are the reason why YouTube can run at reasonable quality on most connections while the competition is still buffering.
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