It is not weird paying for certain things. I also pay for certain things, in fact, over time, I have slowly made my mind to pay for things that are one off payments over recurring subscriptions. I am typing this from Boost client which I purchased because I appreciated dev’s work and it wasn’t subscription hell.

Downloading on Youtube reminds me of the Downloads button on desktop website. Those downloads, upto 1080p atleast at my end, are finicky and since they are playable only in the browser, on the odd occassion , I have found sluggish. I personally think that yt-dlp is much superior with multiple config options that Youtube’s own implementation.

Yes, you are right. Google could if they really wanted to. After all, they bought their Gemini thing(the merits and demerits of it might warrant a separate thread of it’s own) when they saw everyone was scrambling in that direction.