I've also noticed that the YT page itself seems to be working slower now. When I click on the notifications button, the menu takes up to 8s to load, even if there's few items there. Also sometimes the video playback stops and I need to reload the page.
I'm not experiencing such issues on other sites. Weird.

@leocg I see. How can I change that? Isn't that something dictated by the web browser?

It's Opera One(v: 118.0.5461.60), hardware acceleration is enabled.
Here's an example video stats / codec:

I'm having an issue with high usage by Opera recently. 6 tabs opened, 2 active - 4GB of ram and 37% of CPU constantly.
Tried the internal task manager - it's all caused by the tab with Youtube video - it uses over 3GBs and is responsible for 80% of CPU usage of the Opera. I'm watching the video in 720p so it's not even something super high.
I started noticing this behavior few days ago.
My video card drivers are up to date.
What can I do about it?

@leocg :|... in any case I have cases when it ends and this problem does not occur

When I watch YT videos and change tab I get the PIP working ok and I see a small window with the video in the corner. When I return to YT this small window disappears and I see the video in full size.

But sometimes this happens - the full sized video is black and the small window persists:

How to fix it so that always when I return to YT the window auto-closes and reopens when I change tabs?