Obligatory "Why Philosophers Should Care About Computational Complexity" by Scott Aaronson[1], one of the best reads I've ever had from a paper. It debunks the kind of arguments this blog article makes quite deftly.
For instance the argument about the hot iron reminds me of section 6 in the paper "Computationalism and Waterfalls".
For someone to ascribe consciousness to a piece of hot iron (or a waterfall, or any other random or psuedorandom process), we need to create a mapping of its states onto consciousness, or in this case, as a proxy, the program called consiousness.exe.
Aaronson argues if the mapping we create is too complex, it might be doing all of the work of being consious, not the original underlying piece of hot iron.
The article does not go into amount this detail, but it seems like the process of creating this mapping is: make enough mappings at random until one works. It would probably take waaay more mappings than atoms in the universe to try before we hit on one that works (something that's also discussed in Aaronsons' paper in section 4), so I'm not sure if the argument is even relevant.
Give the paper a read, it's one of my favourite pieces of text of all time and Aaronson is better at writing down his ideas than I am.
YouTube themselves haven't done this, but a lot of content creators have started integrating their own ads and sponsorship deals into their content.
This is often done in fun ways where the ad is integrated into the content of the video, so it doesn't annoy me too much and can actually be a fun break from the content of the video.
But for the videos where it _does_ annoy me, I use SponsorBlock [0].
It's an browser extension that lets its users mark certain sections of a video as "ad", "sponsor deal", "self-promotion", etc. to effectively build a crowd-sourced database of ad sections in YouTube videos.
The database is shared and used by the extension to skip the marked sections on most videos I've encountered.
It renders the maths server-side, so there's no runtime needed.
An additional bonus is that the resulting math is copy-pasteable, which in the case of disply math might not be that useful (since most equations are to complex to be meaningfully copy-pasted with unicode), but it helps from inline math dissappearing when copy pasting texts.
But, that being said, I'm sure they had their reasons to do so. For one, MathJax seems more well-known by quite a bit so maybe it's the safer option.