I find the autoplay so annoying because it hides the thumbnail which was carefully designed to communicate why I should click on the video and replaces it with, usually, a talking head or stock footage. Often the video gets inexplicably added to my watch history, and if I do choose to click on it I have to go back to the beginning because I missed the start of the audio
Me too! So I turned them all off:
Youtube Settings -> Playback and performance -> Browsing -> video previews (off)
Kind of forgot how horrible they were until I saw your comment.