Comment by Ascarius

That is random conjecture from someone who also did that for completely different reasons on something else. Admittedly so too is the OP's post, with the added (although unsubstantiated) comment about YouTube refusing to change.

As an aside- his points on why Chrome is a monoculture misses the point. Chrome is a monoculture for the same reason almost every other thing becomes at monoculture. It was, at one point, deserving of it as a product. Whether it was naturally the only one or the best. But now, they might not be the best out there. And when they go on to create barriers to competitors and lock-in, thereby making them artificially dominant, that is an anti trust case in the making, if the U.S. Justice Department had any teeth in that area.

That's a developer that added an invisible div.

That's not the dev that added it, the article is from someone who has done something similar, not someone who works at Google.

It doesn't confirm Google's reasoning for the div