I’m under the impression that Google deliberately hinders their YouTube platform just because you have ad-blockers. With videos taking time to buffer, seems to signal this, because it almost makes up nearly the amount of time for when ads take if you had to watch them. So since you’re ad-blocking and they don’t like that, they’ll make your experience miserable until you want to pay their service or not use ad-block.
They kind of do. Not through some extra sense, but because they have insanely good hearing, and very low visual acuity combined with really good motion detection.
They have a completely different perception of the world, basically everything is a blur, but moving objects stand out. That’s why cats can stare at an unmoving laser dot: they’re not unmoving if you’re a cat.