I honestly don't understand why they simply don't use out of sync data. You could have nodes periodically send aggregates of likes & views, and then add those in to the total ever N heartbeats. Why bother fudging the in-between.

They're probably propagating the likes and views independently. Which still doesn't explain why they allow counter-intuitive gaps like that instead of fixing them up on the client-side in javascript.

Yeah, the view counter is a clear case where they've gone too far. People care about view counts and it seems like every other video I watch has people complaining in the comments about the view count being obviously wrong.

The only time I notice this is when the view counts freeze at 300-ish for a few hours. That's because they're checking if the views are legit or from a bot, IIRC.