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.
Yeah, it seems like it may have been a way to resolve the love triangle. Of course, Harrison Ford almost didn’t come back for Return of the Jedi. I wonder if Luke and Leia would have ended up together in that scenario.