Thank you everyone for the reads and the replies. I want to clarify a few things.

- the main reason i consider it a bug is because there is a difference of behavior between reopening the tab, and clicking from the history on the video. Videos get loaded with two timestamps, one in the url and one through some information received from the server, if it was a feature, the two timestamps should have been the same. The other issue is it was not the case before that if you would load a video from YouTube history, it would only load a timestamp at the js level without having a url timestamp, the url timestamp is especially annoying because it creates problems when you reopen a video from history, watch for a while, pause, and starting watching again much later - it will send you way back to the point where you started rewatching the first time. (It is confusing so read this carefully)

The combination of switching the behavior to loading two timestamps, the two timestamps being different, and as a result of a switch I could be sent back in time for huge chucks of the video (ie 20 minutes, not seconds) just because i paused for a long time on a video i loaded from history, created a set of issues which can not be justified together.

And seeing here, there is at least one person like me, who watches long form content, had the same issue.