Earlier quoted context omitted.
It's really strange though when they offer higher resolution streams for free. So this only really helps for videos that are 1080p. In most cases watching 2k or 4k even on a 1080p monitor will result in better quality (although maybe less bandwidth efficient).
> In most cases watching 2k or 4k even on a 1080p monitor will result in better quality Completely agree and its been super annoying to me that 1080p was compressed so dang aggressively in the past few years.
It's been happening to 4K now too.
I have some yt-dlp copies of videos that I grabbed a couple years ago.
If I go and download them again today from the same video URL, the quality is worse when I compare frames from them directly to each other.