Well, Google, ya gone and done it.
I just uninstalled Chrome, and installed Firefox. The last two days, YouTube turned to shit on me - won't load videos, is clearly heavily throttled. I switch to Firefox - YouTube works perfectly.
If you've been putting off abandoning Chrome, it's a LOT easier than I expected. Firefox imported my history, my logins/passwords, bookmarks, and so on. Completely painless. Chrome has become thoroughly enshittified. Leave it behind.