No, The Solution is to publicly shame Google Inc for wasting the resources.
When it would be on WSJ and The Guardian front page then, maybe, you would see the result.
Replacing the embed a one server/page is like pissing in the ocean - feels great, does nothing.
When a different part of Google publicly shames YT devs for this exact thing (https://web.dev/articles/embed-best-practices#use_click-to-l...), you know that there's little hope for change.
They don't care/internal company policies are misaligned.
Here's Chrome's engineering leader saying that 2.4 seconds to load a page on Reddit is fast actually: https://x.com/addyosmani/status/1678117107597471745
Here's him also writing a huge article on using third-party scripts to improve Youtube embeds because that's apparently better than fixing actual Youtube embeds: https://web.dev/articles/embed-best-practices
BTW, do you know that Youtube's desktop site loads an 2.5 MB CSS file (and 11 MB of Javascript)?
Good luck with that. Not to mention WSJ and The Guardian themselves are babanas heavy for no good reason - like every other media site.