FTA: "YouTube's Polymer redesign relies on the deprecated Shadow DOM v0 API only implemented in Chrome". Shadow DOM v0 never was a standard, merely a proposal in a draft.
Although it's true that only Safari and Chrome (through WebKit and Blink) currently have the best support for Web Components, and polyfills are required for everything else due to flaky support.
Google even mentions this in the Polymer README:
"Web Components are now implemented natively on Safari and Chrome (~70% of installed browsers), and run well on Firefox, Edge, and IE11 using polyfills. Read more below."