Out of the box it can play audio in the background, and now that extensions are available you can block ads as well. You don’t really need constantly updating 3rd party clients or questionable firewalls anymore if you just want usable youtube on a phone.
This is a pretty fair argument. It reminds me of the early 2010s when the sentiment everyone had was “we have an app for that”. We don’t need more specialized apps (which really aren’t that specialized - most of these do exactly the same thing), we just need intelligent solutions using what we have. Back in the day that was responsive layouts, today it’s browser extensions.