Ah. I get around those issues by paying for YouTube, because as a Gen X’er I believe in paying for good services. :P (And its recommendations are excellent, now that Google knows me so well. LOL)
Now I check, Youtube still generates timestamped URLs with it in the query string. I wonder where the # alternative comes from.
I hand-made the URL. I could have used a querystring as well, but the pound symbol usually indexes down to a particular part of a page, so it makes sense that they would also make it index to a particular part of a video