Comment by unhappy_meaning

YouTube overall quality has been in a slow decline for the last several years and I'm sure it has to do with $$.

The UI is slower in almost all aspects, the grid mentioned here isn't even aligned properly. Playback buttons are slow to respond to hovers and clicks and the 1080p quality is no longer a "true" 1080p quality.

Don't even get me started with shorts because while the baseline functionality of it works, its pretty buggy for what it is. Maybe they are just too busy with scaling the entire thing that UI is an afterthought because the basic functionality is there and now its profits over quality.