I’m sure having all computers in existence come by default with window and offering free stuff to students has nothing to do with it.

/s

I think it store more if you gave history on. Anyway the recommended are still there at the end of the video or sidebar. But yeah shitty dark pattern

Funny think about that.

I also had it disabled, started watching a longer(ish) video, closed the video and enabled history and somehow YouTube knew how much I already watched before history was on.

So my guess is that history off is only for the user, YouTube knows anyway, it just pretends not to store it