It might be due to local caching requirements and too many people on the network at the VPN. It wouldn’t be due to the VPN, but due to the resources YT has installed at the local ISP.

They have back boxes. They cache the most popular and regional favorites locally, intercept, and serve them much more directly. It started happening around 2017. That is why YT shifted away from being a community and into an algorithm of promotions of certain individuals instead. I have to let YT around the VPN or it has problems too.

Not exactly. The nonsense right wing rage politics is a denial of service attack that has not been effectively countered in many decades. The USA has a tenth of the laws, protections, and regulations of any western country. The goal of the stupid politics is distraction. No effective discussion is possible when everyone is playing whack a mole. This is the entire strategy. It is very simple and effective. The goal is simply to keep all of the loopholes open so the parasitic billionaires can steal all the wealth and pay nothing for it. They have bought the government by playing the long game. We live in a neo feudal state as a result. Freedom and democracy are an illusion.

Fucking corporate feudalism bullshit. The US government has turned everyone into serfs again. We stepped back sociopolitical progress by 1000 years because of stupidity. We are officially the dumbest people in the last 1000 years. Future generations will despise everything about us and what we lost because we were to stupid to do anything about it.

Yes

This is no longer as hard as it has been in the digital-deep past. You need to learn now. The time has past for taking control being an early adopters thing. Linux is orders of magnitude larger than Windows in terms of both hardware compatibility and software. All of the issues that still exist are due to shitty companies that are trying to exploit you with proprietary theft of ownership. You should self educate and know about these anyways. They are the foundations of the dystopian technogarchy. Almost anything a generation or two old is going to work fine with Linux and little research needed. You can buy stuff from specialists like System76, Star Labs, and Tuxedo. You can even buy several options with Linux preinstalled from Lenovo and stuff like the HP Dev One.

You can buy routers with OpenWRT preinstalled or even versions with simplified front ends like pcWRT and others.

Installing Graphene on a Pixel is not hard. This is nothing like the old days of custom ROMs on phones. Graphene will introduce you to a Matrix chat embedded in their webpage just in case you have any issues or do not understand something after reading the documentation. There is an enormous supportive community for Graphene on their Matrix channel and someone will help you in a live chat. The entire build process is almost entirely automated. All you do is open a chrome browser and plug in USB following the instructions once. All the updates are automatically installed over the network after that. The bootloader is locked, root is locked, it is just like a typical OEM experience except there is no stalkerware with things like google recording everything from your microphone 24/7, tracking your location, and everyone/everything you interact with.