Actually I'm with the GP: A large number of videos I cared about were unwatchable - and the reason was usually low key background music from say an uploaded twitch stream.
In other words: I don't (usually, it's quite rare) go to YT for music and still I really believe that this change improves my usage.
I don't bother with proxy solutions, so this change is most welcome to me.
Note that you didn't really have to do anything but install a Chrome extension. If you left it turned on it would detect when a video was blocked and reload the page through some proxy. Pretty low effort overall. Otherwise I would not have done it myself, the only videos I ever needed it for were pure music videos, which I can easily live without if it's even slightly inconvenient to see them.
And remember the comment I replied to said "YT was completely unusable in Germany", which is definitely not true no matter how any one individual person might have been affected. It's one thing to speak about ones own experiences, but YT wasn't "unusable in Germany".
Sure, "completely unusable" is similar to the "literally unplayable" gaming meme: Way over the top. I tried to point out that our experience (yours, mine) differ and mine was repeatedly/often disturbed due to random GEMA claims, while not even looking for music.
(I don't use Chrome, but I assume there'd be a Firefox extension. Then again, I remember that there used to be a ~shady~ extension for exactly this YT issue and I just never felt good about installing an extension for my browser for this narrow a use case.)
I agree about the extensions in general. I had a very strange issue that Google kept asking me for confirmation that I'm not a robot. I initially suspected my aging router had been captured, so I replaced it. But only when I removed the BTTV (Better Twitch TV) extension did it stop. I repeated the experiment, one or two days after reinstalling it I was again blocked by Google, and the block again disappeared very shortly after removing it a second time. That extension actually loads most of its code from a server, which they even write about in their README - I have no idea how this is allowed in the Chrome store.
This is why I had the Youtube-proxy extension disabled, and only enabled briefly for when I needed it for a specific video. Incidentally, today in the headlines: WOT - Web Of Trust - an extension used by millions on several browsers, has sold all browsing data of all their users to 3rd parties. Worst part: According to journalists who purchased the data they were able to actually identify individual users because of the many details that were included.
In other words: I don't (usually, it's quite rare) go to YT for music and still I really believe that this change improves my usage.
I don't bother with proxy solutions, so this change is most welcome to me.