Wanted to mention this seems to be fixed, but I was never able to find a tool that could tell me why it was occurring.

It was ultimately NTP (clock), but it was actually the router clock. I switched PCs and I think my original PC had software to talk to the router, which must've been setting the time. It seems like it changed to a completely different time at some point.

Changed it, then just released/renewed/flushed dns. I also manually turned on the time service at some point and ran a sync from the command prompt just to be safe. and everything is acting normally now.

Update: So far i'm down to 2 extensions:
Ublock
600% sound volume

Memory still ballooned from 1GB to 5GB.

When I checked processes before closing, even after force unloading Youtube under processes, GPU was using around 1 GB. There was literally nothing else I could unload that would stop this.

Again I loaded all tabs just to be fair...GPU is using half of that currently. I'm also questioning the reliability of about:processes to an extent, because I couldn't actually see what was adding up to the 5 GB I was seeing in task manager.

I thought the song was already beautiful (it released early on youtube - topics), but the mv itself is also really beautiful.