Just select Chrome. Google uses the delay specifically on Firefox. I only enable it for Youtube and Gmail URLs because it can mess with other websites.

As I said User-Agent switcher for Firefox gets rid of the 5 second wait before the site loads.

Spoken like a cynical back end developer. Communication is key.

Did you tell your friend ads waste far more time than the 3-5 second delay you get on Firefox with ublock? I mean, I get someone would hesitate to install another extension like User-Agent Switcher because you don’t really want to trust it, but even then just using ublock is still faster than watching ads.

Companies are becoming even more greedy recently across the board and at a rapid pace. Some people would want you to believe Youtube wouldn’t generate billions of dollars as income annually for Alphabet for some reason. But the truth is the platform is extremely profitable already. Youtube simply wants even more now because competition has done the same. We’ve seen prices spiraling up and quality dropping in pretty much all sectors of the economy and this trend will continue for the forseeable future.

In short: Because they can (some are really stretching their boundaries, though)