Oh they have been very clear about needing youtube premium for that. I do get it to an extent. If people want to use it as a jukebox. I have spotify and mp3s for that. I want to play videos in the background that don't have actual visual content ("people talking to the camera" style) and google doesn't want that. Luckily I can use alternatives for nearly all content like this, first and foremost actual RSS podcasts.

As for the experience being very different on premium: I recently had to use YT on a browser without uBlock/uMatrix and I believe I got a taste of that difference. Scary stuff, not sure how people cope with all the shit being thrown at them.

On Firefox for Android for example, the vast majority of video playing sites automatically continue to play in the background. YouTube should, but it has code specifically to check for Firefox tabs being backgrounded and pause the player. So it's going out of its way to disable a feature of the browser. Happily this can be reversed with an extension, but yes, it is an intentional anti-feature. Whether you agree with that business practice is your own judgement.

Personally I think the real value add of Youtube Premium is the ability to offline videos in the official app; that's not something the browser can normally do. Well, and the secondary effect of contributing somewhat to creators, even if the payout isn't significant through that channel. It's nice for it to be automatic and not require an explicit subscription.