You need Youtube Premium for that. I have a legacy Google Play Music subscription and sometimes I feel like my experience vastly different than people without Youtube Premium. I use Youtube enough I'm ok paying to not see ads and play videos with my phone screen off.
Oh they have been very clear about needing youtube premium for that.
I do get it to an extent. If people want to use it as a jukebox. I have spotify and mp3s for that. I want to play videos in the background that don't have actual visual content ("people talking to the camera" style) and google doesn't want that.
Luckily I can use alternatives for nearly all content like this, first and foremost actual RSS podcasts.
As for the experience being very different on premium: I recently had to use YT on a browser without uBlock/uMatrix and I believe I got a taste of that difference. Scary stuff, not sure how people cope with all the shit being thrown at them.
I dont mind paying for the feature but I do mind having google aplication on my phone (which I dont - none).
The trust in google not taking away my contacts, spying on my position, requiring to have their gms on my phone (which will further grab as much of my data they can have) is virtually zero.
