I've always wondered why YouTube doesn't use Widevine DRM like Netflix, Disney+, Prime Video, and other paid sites use. Is there a reason why using Widevine wouldn't be possible for YouTube? It looks like Widevine only requires files to be encrypted once on the server so it wouldn't break CDNs and encrypting the files would be cheap compared to the video encoding. Widevine has extremely broad support.

I'm not saying I like the idea of YouTube DRM. This is a technical (maybe organizational) question of whether there's something stopping Google from using Widevine for YouTube. Google is going through a ton of effort to frustrate tools like Invidious and yt-dlp when it seems (to me) that Widevine would accomplish their goal without as much effort (but there might be stuff I'm unaware of).