Typical people don't add stuff to a URL, but if they see a link that says "youtube.com/playlists", they will probably not expect it to be some garbage channel not affiliated with Youtube.
Honestly I'm surprised that YT would let users have anything like a top level path; I'd expect it to be all youtube.com/u/myuser/$FOO where FOO can be a video or playlist or whatever.
I have to imagine it's for backwards compatibility. Seems to have been a choice made in 2008[0] if not before, although new handles are primarily accessible via `/@handle`.
To add: the top video only has 10k views over 2 months. YT is watched by billions of people every day, 5k people a month accidentally going to /playlists probably isn't worth the cost of kicking back their username and paying the engineers to make the commit reserving that url.
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[ 0.26 ms ] story [ 50.1 ms ] threadWhat I'd want to know is what percentage of netizens* even know that you can just add stuff to a url willy-nilly.
* as I type this word, the cognoscenti can literally hear my bones creak
People will quickly realize that /playlists loads some random channel they don't care about and will click away.
0: https://web.archive.org/web/20080501135434/https://www.youtu...
I realize that is horribly glib, but it's also horribly accurate.