I like how different people have different perspectives of the same event. I use Mozilla Firefox with uBlock Origin. YouTube videos do not play automatically when I click on YouTube links from other websites.

Personally, my conspiracy theory is that somehow the YouTube team twisted Google Chrome team's arms to force them to make a byzantine system so that YouTube videos would pretty much always auto play. I cannot imagine how any self-respecting programmer(TM) would agree to such nonsense unless they were being paid very handsomely.