It’s not easily block able as it scrapes the YouTube website. They’d have to stop having a website for that to happen.
The problem with scraping is that while it’s difficult/impossible to block completely, it’s pretty easy to keep making changes to your site to disrupt scrapers. The work required by the scraper to adapt to those changes is usually way more than the work you put in to disrupt them.
So if a commercial site wants to make scraping unreliable and impractical, they almost certainly can.
Honestly curious if they’d ever consider that, considering how popular watching youtube on the phone is, so I could see them trying to get even desktop users to use an app to prevent 3rd party launchers
If they did though, it would probably cause at least a decent number of people to try to find alternatives
At the end of the day, the main way the fediverse gets new users is the big tech companies screwing up
The only problem with YouTube alternatives like peertube is video is it’s a LOT harder to store/stream than just text with occasional images (especially if it’s higher res like is common these days)
I would love for it to catch on, but honestly don’t see how it could for any real percentage of people
That beeing said, if YouTube ever messes up to that extent, I’ll be one of the first out the door