I’ve been having stutters in YouTube for a while. In troubleshooting it I discovered an extension manager that is awesome and so much better for this than anything I’ve found before: One Click Extension Manager -No Ads. Two great things about it: 1) it offers a “Disable all extensions” option and 2) you just click an extension in the list to toggle its enablement. Wonderful and easy!
In this particular case, it seems like uMatrix was causing the stutters. Which is really unfortunate because it has been by far the most effective and powerful extension I’ve found for blocking HTTP requests, cookies, etc. EXTREMELY granular and well designed interface. Maybe I’ll just disable it when I want to watch video.