What a shame. What's the point even? I'm not going subscribe to YouTube premium anyway, and even less install and use the YouTube app. What happens with this move is just that I will just use YouTube less. I believe that's the case for most people who chose to use YouTube in a browser precisely for background playback.
As an example: knowing that I won't be able to keep the sound playing for the 5 minutes in between two buses when I need to walk and pay attention, I'll probably just launch a podcast from the beginning of my hour of transportation so that I'm not interrupted. For these five minutes, they loose me for almost an hour.
The point is that youtube is an ad-funded service, and if you're not watching the ads, Google is losing money on you.
Perhaps that's what they desire. Serving YouTube video has marginal cost and you provide marginal zero value. Losing you as a customer is probably desired.