I disagree on that—in the YouTube example specifically this isn't necessarily a problem, but the toast serves a valuable purpose in the archive in that it tells you again which button it was that you pressed. There have been countless times in cases like that where the toast has saved me and allowed me to undo a misclick.
I can see the argument that there are certain places where people use toasts that are unnecessary and provide information that the user doesn't need. But that's not the same thing as toasts being bad UX in the general case.
Toasts also give you a good place to put other shortcuts like “Item updated. [View item]” that make it much easier to act on state changes, like navigate to sensible places to view / react to those changes.
> Toasts also give you a good place to put other shortcuts like “Item updated. [View item]” that make it much easier to act on state changes
Not if they go away, and take their “[View item]” button with them, before you've had time to read the notification, decide if you want to click the button, and actually get your cursor there to click it.
Which they usually do. So nyaaah, dubious benefit.
Should complex websites have a notification center where you can look at prior notifications? Would this be alike enough to existing desktop metaphors to be easily recognizable or simply confusing.
Maybe your browser should could have an icon for same instead making it more standardized across different sites.