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The way YouTube annotations were used could tell you a lot about the character of people whose videos you were watching. On average, not many good things. Overall, getting rid of them made the YouTube experience significantly better, though as you say, losing corrections was an unfortunate collateral damage. They should've just auto-appended them to video descriptions with timestamps on them - the way many music compilations have a list of constituent songs with clickable timestamps.

Unfortunately, after removing annotations, YouTube added a really obnoxious popup with recommended videos that shows up whenever you pause the video, obscuring a good 1/3 of it. It's like they really want people to hate them.

Wasn't that open only to the video's uploader though?

Much of the time it was used to create full screen transparent links to other videos, or other obnoxious things decreasing QoL. Still sad to see it go though.