I knew I wasn’t just imagining things. I like to listen to music on YouTube when driving to work. And sure, the internet reception there is spotty (danke, Merkel), but for a couple weeks now I’ve consistently had a very long “buffering” period every time the next video/song loaded up.
Well, joke’s on them. I found out about NewPipe and its built-in video/audio downloader, because I complained to an acquaintance about it.