That has irked me for quite some time. I always manually select 1080p, because sometimes YT claims it's already playing 1080p, but it's obviously not and the video starts buffering anew when I select 1080p manually. Quite annoying
Roughly around the same time as the anti-adblocking effort, youtube started just not playing the video stream for me much of the time. I say play a video, it will start playing the audio, and the video will just be a frozen image.
In unrelated news, my youtube-dl usage is way, way up.
Get the "Enhancer for Youtube" extension, among many adjustments, it does this clicking for you.
I also had this issue, videos would frequently wobble down to like 240p or whatever, on a stable, high speed wired connection.
It's not an internet problem since I never have to buffer when using this forced setting, so it's probably YT trying to save a few bandwidth bucks when they think people aren't looking.
