I'm also in the rural 'my ISP is a WIFI ISP' boat.. I pay for 10/2! While they do burst its not uncommon for my speeds to dip down into single digits. Sometimes I have to tune my video streams down as low as they'll go. Packet latency can frequently be so bad that playing online games is VERY DIFFICULT so I mostly play single player, downloads of new games often take 24 hours+.
My ISP when I talk to them about their speed issues "Well, 7mbps is all you need to stream Hulu", which is.. a terrible response. Want to do something else while streaming? What if _two_ people want to stream? What if I want to stream a video while my partner is playing a game online?
Ads are simply a _HUGE WASTE_ of my bandwidth, so I filter as much as I can.
If I were to keep my insurance policy number in my car in the form of 9 bricks with a number on each one, I honestly wouldn't notice. The car would seem to drive exactly the same. There are even plenty of dead spaces to hide them where they wouldn't even noticeably consume cargo space.
Yet for some reason I will not place 9 unneccessary bricks in my car, nor tolerate them if I discovered them already there.
I used to stream all my videos 144p less than 5 years ago because streaming any higher resulted in a stuttering buffering mess. Youtube was the only streaming service I could watch because most other sites didn't bother with resolutions/bitrates so low. Maybe that's why youtube won out. Much like how whatsapp made it their mission to run on every phone they could get their hands on.
Now we have proper internet I don't but don't for a second doubt that a sizable portion of the internet still suffer from slow speeds, even those living in developed countries.
You’re right about 2MB being a large payload in some network configurations, but I think it isn’t that big in Youtube’s context.