I’m under the impression that Google deliberately hinders their YouTube platform just because you have ad-blockers. With videos taking time to buffer, seems to signal this, because it almost makes up nearly the amount of time for when ads take if you had to watch them. So since you’re ad-blocking and they don’t like that, they’ll make your experience miserable until you want to pay their service or not use ad-block.
they have been know for as long as they did to vpn users, at least eariler 2024. apparently they have been increasing thier filters to target other things like different kinds of proxies anti-detection methods that spammers use. and my favorite is do the BARE minimum against russian troll farms, palintir bots, and AI.