On mobile, they don't play videos unless the screen is on except if it's an ad, then they have all of these favorable bugs where your phone unexpectedly starts playing a whistling song with a twanging ukulele talking about mattresses.

There's that other bug where they disable the navigation during the ads and you have to turn the screen off and back on to the lock screen to get rid of it.

Such fortuitous defects.

Brendan Eichs Brave browser bypasses the YouTube bullshit if you want a workaround on android.