@lso just want to let you know that a lot of the things you assumed in your tirade isn’t true. Such as the issue wasn’t caused by Google/YouTube and all. But I’m right there with you in saying I hope Google/YouTube will stop with their crazy changes on trying to force ads and all.
The issue just was in component updates which still occur to help provide updates to things like content filters used by Shields to help make sure you don’t see ads. The content filters used new rules that the Rust engine in older versions couldn’t handle, therefore causing the crash. These were custom rules being used to combat YouTube.
This issue should be resolved for you now. If not, you’ll want/need to go to brave://components and update everything there. For more details, you can check out Aggregate Topic: Outdated Brave crashing on YouTube - #242 by fanboynz and keep reading through replies to that.
If you have any further issues, please respond in the topic linked. Thanks.