Likes from logged in views do count, the like to view ratio is higher due to that.
A German YouTuber tested it with an unlisted video, I can’t find it as of now but I do find a lot of deleted videos in my liked ones…
Basic theory as of the time of the video is that they want to go against bot views. Short views did not decline, only long form video, and of those the people with mostly desktop views are hit the most.
Edit: found it!
Why is that crazy?
You don’t want to register a view just because the backend sent a 200 response for the video.
You want to register a view when the video has loaded, it has begun to play, and quite likely after some arbitrary percentage of the video.
This is all front end information. How much of the video was made available to the front end to play isn’t really relevant.
Alright, not “crazy”, but this doesn’t explain how they combat exploiting this by just calling the end point.