

Same here. My wife and I primarily watch YouTube (mainly let’s play style stuff, but a lot of non-game stuff as well). Looking at my homepage right now, I’ve got a few gaming videos, some Dropout (amazing comedy), some 3D printing and DIY videos.
Over the years, the algorithm has gotten pretty good with its recommendations for us. Watching some niche videos barely affects our feeds.
You got a source for that?
One of the ways VPNs work is by having all your web traffic look like it’s coming from somewhere else, obscuring where you’re really from. They will see a different IP address than what yours actually is. If you were the only person doing this there would be no problem, but VPNs only have so many servers so companies often know what IP addresses those are. What they see is THOUSANDS of actions being taken by a single IP address, so of course it looks like bots! It makes total sense to have some verification to help against DDOS attacks and bad actors.