>>1536442firefox + ublock origin works for me but videos will take 15 seconds to "load" before they play
They do this intentionally, they even give a popup saying that they're doing this to punish you for using an adblocker.
I work around it by opening a few videos in tabs, paused.
Alternatively, you can use yt-dlp to download a video and watch it with your favorite media player (I use MPV). (Other youtube downloading apps use yt-dlp internally.)
I don't know how much doing this all day wears your SSD, so you can install a ramdisk if you're worried.
yt-dlp should be updated regularly because there is a cat and mouse game going on between it and youtube, they keep changing the API to fuck with it
