I can see how that's off-putting, but I've learned to ignore the occasional cosmetic hiccup and just trust that it will sync up correctly. I use it with --predict=experimental (largely undocumented), which seems to be even more aggressive, but it works great for me.
Try pairing tmux with mosh, it's how I've been working for years whenever I'm forced to admin through a brittle straw. Mosh combats lag pretty well and doesn't care if your connection drops intermittently. https://mosh.org/
This is the reason I stopped contributing eventually. Can't download the db, API limits so low you can exhaust them with a couple exploratory queries, and a small group of people getting overly defensive when asked about it. I don't mind working for free, but this sucked the fun out of it.
I've heard variants of this story so many times, but it leaves me confused over my own experience. This sort of high frequency breakage just does not happen for me, I can't even say rarely. Definitely not on youtube. So what is going on there?
This fork integrates sponsorblock, been using it for a while and even though the maintainer calls the integration "rather basic" it works quite well.
https://github.com/polymorphicshade/NewPipe