JWBananas

There's something so... familiar... about it.

I love when actors do this out of a genuine love for the potential of a character

Frakes and Sirtis did this with their characters as well in TNG.

Aside from the initial introduction to their past relationship, the writers wanted to leave it in the past so that they could explore other stories. But the actors played it up every chance they could get.

That still didn't stop the writers from pushing Troi and Worf together toward the end for some bizarre reason. But if not for the actors' efforts to keep things alive throughout the run of TNG, Troi and Riker may not have ended up together in the end.

A most logical answer to this

Except for Sisko

Launch him through the nearest Stargate.

Or, you know, Far Beyond the Stars.

Holy moly!

“If we don’t have Spotify working properly across Play services and core services, people will not buy Android phones,” Harrison testified.

Google: Sorry, other devs! You just aren't as important as Spotify!

[I mean, they aren't wrong. But this does not bode well for them!]

Sometimes, less is more.

I would recommend trimming all your custom configuration from your router/firewall, one change at a time, until you can no longer reproduce the issue.

Or go the other way around: set up a barebones configuration, confirm the issue is resolved, and begin adding one customization at a time until it breaks.

How do your bufferbloat tests look?

https://www.waveform.com/tools/bufferbloat

It sounds like you have a lot of stateful inspection configured. YouTube's heavy usage of QUIC (i.e. UDP transport) may not play well with your config.

And, incidentally, what does your hardware look like?

Frankly, even the most barebones router should be able to handle YouTube. I am running pfSense in an ESXi VM, with passthru Intel gigabit NICs, 2 GB reserved RAM, and 2 vCPU (shared, but with higher priority than other VMs) on a Dell desktop with a second-gen i7 that was shipped from the factory in 2012.

Yes, I am routing on decade-old hardware. And I have never seen anything like what you are describing.

YouTube should "just work."

I am going to assume that if you're running OpenWRT, then you are probably using a typical consumer router? Please correct me if I am wrong.

Have you by any chance tried backing up your OpenWRT config and going back to stock firmware?

I know, I know, OpenWRT is great. I have a consumer router that I flashed with it to use strictly as a wireless AP.

But consumer devices flashed with vanilla OpenWRT tend to have very, very little resources left over to handle fun configurations.

And I have a feeling some of the fun configuration might be contributing to your issues.

It's not just storage capacity either. Google uses custom silicon just to keep up with all the transcoding.

https://blog.youtube/inside-youtube/new-era-video-infrastructure/

At the time that article was released (April 2021), users were uploading over 500 hours of video per minute.