tl;dw They freeze the view count at 300 to do some background checks for determing valid,non-robot views. Sometimes users are viewing simultaneously so the number can get to 301,302,etc before being stopped. Limiting number 300 was an arbitrary choice.
it is all about distribution and caching. same thing would happen if you change you cover photo on facebook. it would take some time to propagate though all datacenters, thus someone is Australia would see your old photo, while users served from US datacenter would see latest cover photo.
Spoiler: a YT eng^H^H^Hmouthpiece handwaves for quite some time about how they fail at distributed systems and can't accurately count views from cached content.
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