I think their reasoning is that if it’s just a few seconds it “simplifies” the UI, which is why if the reel is just a bit longer it is trackable.

TikTok on the other hand I think the video needs to be much longer to be trackable.

YouTube shorts are seekable.

It’s a double edged sword, because the seekability of YT Shorts mean I’ll actually watch them.

Not in my web browser right at this minute. I have to edit the URL from /shorts/ to /watch?v= all the time.

I used a greasemonkey script to automatically edit the URL for me

That is a relatively recent change.

Huh, yeah, I just checked and can indeed now scrub them! It's been a while since I last gave them a chance.

Really wish the engineers behind that design did us a solid and at least left the shortcut keys (left/right/j/l) in. Dropping those too is criminal.