Everything on YouTube is incredibly slow on Microsoft Edge

In the past few days, absolutely everything has been incredibly slow and unresponsive whenever I'm using YouTube on Edge.

Videos take forever to load and start playing, and they're default playing on the lowest quality even though I have Fiber internet and have not had any problems with it at all on any website since I upgraded to it 3 years ago. When they do finally start playing, they're prone to playing a few seconds of desynced audio and/or visual and then stopping again, and repeating that process four, five, even six times before the video syncs and starts displaying and playing correctly. This is not happening on every single video I try watching, but it is affecting the majority of them.

In addition to having troubles with videos loading and playing, it's also taking a while for my clicks to register on anything. Thumbnails, the home button, the Notifications button, opening the menu next to thumbnails to add videos to playlists, etc. Comments take forever to type even when I'm typing one character at a time; when I try typing a whole sentence in one go, sometimes it takes up to a minute for the sentence to actually appear. Keyboard shortcuts (like Space to pause a video and F11 to open/close Full Screen mode) are also slow and unresponsive. The delay can be anything from a second or two up to a full 10 seconds.

I'm also having major problems when trying to watch from my Playlists; I do a lot of online gaming, and generally I like to have music playing in the background, so I have a mega-playlist of music that I have playing on Shuffle. As mentioned above, it takes forever for the video to start playing, but when I'm watching/listening to my music playlist it has the additional problem of there being a massive delay between one video ending and the next starting.

None of these issues are apparent on any other website I have visited since the problems began, and YT itself is not indicating there is anything amiss other than occasionally displaying the "Experiencing interruptions?" popup, which if I try to click on, has the exact same issue of being incredibly slow and unresponsive (in this case, with actually navigating to the appropriate link).

I have tried everything I can think of to resolve these issues: clearing the cache, deleting cookies, uninstalling and reinstalling the browser, turning Hardware Acceleration off, signing out of my account and signing back in later on, etc. I have searched the web for this issue, but haven't come across any reference to it happening now (Jan 2024), nor any solution.

My browser is currently updated to the latest version.

It's absolutely ridiculous that I am suddenly having all of these issues at the exact same time after never having any of them happen to me at all except for the occasional one-off occurrence.