Not mentioned in the article, one of the main reasons to ALWAYS do this is SEO. Regardless if users will play the video or not, web crawlers will not play the video and Google will penalize your SEO ranking if you use official Google's YouTube embed :D

We implemented our own thumbnail image trick on TestDome homepage a few years ago (https://www.testdome.com/). Thumbnail is from: https://img.youtube.com/vi/gPQQg4yZqt8/sddefault.jpg