I wonder if it depends what country you are in. I only notice it occasionally when the video won't play in FreeTube or PipePipe (which always has the pause at the start since the last few months) and I'm forced to open an incognito browser tab to watch, and then I realize just how many ads other people are being subjected to before they can even watch the video.

I bet you're using Chrome. Open a video in Chrome and the video is immediately playable, load the same video on the same machine in Firefox and you can expect to wait 5+ seconds for the video to be playable.

I suspect that non-Chrome browsers are being intentionally hobbled

I did a pretty low rigor test and just pulled up one of those 4K videos with the swirling ink in Firefox on my M1 Mac and it seemed to load just as fast. The only difference was that it didn't autoplay the video (because I'm logged out I think) but I clicked it as the page loaded and it played instantly.

I don't doubt at all that Google hobbles their sites on Firefox but at least on my machine they aren't doing a great job of it

You likely pay for YouTube premium if you aren’t noticing adds

I do pay for premium but my impression of the parent was that this was independent of ads. The test I did in the other comment didn't trigger an ad for some reason even though I was logged out, which may be why it loaded so fast.

Ah. The parent mentioned several frustrations that I am not familiar with (presumably since I also pay for premium and don’t block the ads), but my impression was that the delay was caused by the code refusing to play the video until the time slot for the ad had completed even if the ad failed to load (as would happen when blocking the ad http request)

FreeBSD + Waterfox, or Firefox for that matter. YouTube really likes to strangle those who are not in their domain.

If I set my user agent to something like Linux/Ubuntu, it loads just fine. If I set my user agent to some unheard Linux distro, it lags as the same with FreeBSD.