For now. YouTube can make it not work whenever they want by implementing something like WEI. I wonder why they are afraid of doing so.
They’re playing the long game here. First they assimilated browser space with Chrome, then they disabled manifest v2, and the next step will probably be some reincarnation of WEI just like you said, in order to close down the open internet for good.
If you look at the state of the web right now, most of the interactions and traffic go through the dedicated apps of the big tech (spyware, basically) who are vendor-locking the experience. I figure it will divide the web even further into two entities, one being the addictive big-tech apartheid spyware gardens, and the other being the free fediverse-like FOSS-natured web for privacy and tech enthusiasts, with severely limited interaction between the two. I’ll always choose the latter, thank you very much.
