1. Suddenly my Google Home would only use YouTube Music when playing to the Chromecast on my TV.
2. YouTube Music, among a bunch of other terrible UX issues around how it considers music to be organized/related, has the extremely annoying quality of always playing videos of the music instead of just the music.
3. Turns out there's an option in your account settings to tell it to only play audio, no videos.
4. Also, turns out this setting has zero effect when playing through a Chromecast, and thus the damnable videos persist.
5. So, I said, "Eff it!" and signed up for a Hi-Fi Tidal account (the audio quality improvement is immediately apparent, BTW) to replace my Google Play Music... er, YouTube Music instigated brewing household clusterf*ck (the chance was screwing with my wife & two little kids' ability to listen to music with the ease and predictability they had with Google Play Music).
6. I can cast Tidal to the Chromecast from my phone, so I figured I could link it in my Google Home device, and our household music situation would be basically back to normal. Nope...NOPE!
7. You can't set Tidal as a music service for your Google Home, which turned me into the family's sporadic impromptu disc jockey throughout the day, and entirely broke the kids' ability to manage their own music enjoyment.
8. Turns out Amazon's device ecosystem doesn't have this problem, so the Chromecast got replaced with a Fire TV stick and an Alexa pod.
In one felled swoop, via the most utterly existentially dubious product rollout and migration, Google managed to motivate me to eat the switching cost of replacing 100% of their hardware and 100% of their media services from my family's life. Truly a spectacular "own goal" on Google's behalf... and for what? What is even the point of YouTube Music?