>And yet any media player beats it at its core functionality: video playback.
I would argue YouTube's core functionality is "making it easy to share videos with family, friends, and the world". Allowing playback of the videos on the page makes this functionality easier.
>Often I find myself using youtube-dl to fetch a youtube video and just play it in a regular media player because it just works better than what browsers have to offer.
I do this too - although only because an addon I have causes Firefox to memleak if I leave a YouTube tab open too long. Rather than finding the problem and fixing it - I download a video I want to watch and close the YouTube tab. Honestly my video player of choice (MPC-HC) does exactly what the YouTube player does. It plays the video. Not a whole lot of bells and whistles needed to do that.
I would argue YouTube's core functionality is "making it easy to share videos with family, friends, and the world". Allowing playback of the videos on the page makes this functionality easier.
>Often I find myself using youtube-dl to fetch a youtube video and just play it in a regular media player because it just works better than what browsers have to offer.
I do this too - although only because an addon I have causes Firefox to memleak if I leave a YouTube tab open too long. Rather than finding the problem and fixing it - I download a video I want to watch and close the YouTube tab. Honestly my video player of choice (MPC-HC) does exactly what the YouTube player does. It plays the video. Not a whole lot of bells and whistles needed to do that.