You aren’t wrong in the bigger picture, but the fact that I can change to the highest resolution and I get essentially 0 buffer time and it just automatically starts playing at the higher resolution tells me that the bandwidth is there between my device and whatever server I end up connected to that is hosting the data. Otherwise I would likely have a slight delay of a few seconds for it to buffer as it pulls down the data.

And even if you select high resolution preferred in settings, they will absolutely serve that shit at a low resolution forcing you to manually select the resolution every damn time.

Yes YouTube my connection is absolutely fast enough to watch at the max resolution you can serve, don’t pretend it’s my connection to cover for your intentional bumping down in resolution.