I’m already a Premium user, so I suspect I won’t see a change. That said, I’m against turning formerly free features into paid ones. Especially something as useful as playback speed, which has been around forever. Whoever is making the decisions at YouTube is seems to be making one bad decision after another.

The biggest issue with going to an alternative is that one doesn’t really exist. Yes, there are other video sharing sites, but they have a tiny sliver of the content YouTube has, as a viewer. As a creator, they have only a tiny sliver of the viewers, which hurts monetization efforts.

I've switched to watching youtube videos using mpv. yt-dlp thankfully works, and this way, I can watch the video any way I want.

Never heard of mpv until you mentioned it just now. Very interesting.

Does this bookmarklet work to give you 2x speed anyway?

    javascript:for(v of document.getElementsByTagName('video'))v.playbackRate=2;void(0)

Interestingly, it doesn't. I'll later spend some time checking the tag name. Thanks for the idea, I might code that into an extension.

There are several extensions to manage playback speed, most allow faster speeds. Do they work for you?

Not anymore

Product management at YouTube baffles me.

What is being improved by removing speed controls? Certainly nothing on the user side of the equation.

No worries. The speed is built into the web browser. YouTube cannot disable it. Meaning, even if they remove the option from the player UI, the functionality cannot be removed. A simple browser extension will therefore always be available to supplement it.

What if they start rendering video in js on canvas with a fully custom solution.

From what I rememebr it is a very inefficient way of doing it, FPS will be a problem and I think properly syncing sound, at least over longer than few seconds, might be even impossible. Either way, it makes very little sense on too many levels to do that.

They can set it back to 1 using javascript any time it is increased though.

Don't be so sure - the company that owns YouTube also probably owns your web browser.