> I would guess YouTube, being built on google's infrastructure , has powerful enough edge nodes that they stream one video stream to each edge location and the edges transcode for the clients.

Ha, no, our edge nodes don't have anywhere near enough spare CPU to do transcoding on the fly.

We have our own issues with livestreaming, but our system's developed differently over the past 15 years compared to Netflix's. While they've historically focused on intelligent pre-placement of data (which of course doesn't work for livestreaming), such an approach was never feasible for YT with the sheer size of our catalog (thanks to user-generated content).

Netflix is still new to the space, and there isn't a good substitute for real-world experience for understanding how your systems behave under wildly different traffic patterns. Give them some time.