I couldn’t find it again, sorry. But it wasn’t any real brand that did this (yet), but cheap noname TV clones (similar to those Trojan horse android boxes). Not something you’d trust anyway, but didn’t expect them trying to bridge the gap to get telemetry.
Yeah I’ve been doing that for years on every site I use frequently (so far that I even got my own YouTube filter list on github). It doesn’t help with broken searches ignoring operators, but it makes the web a much better place nonetheless!