Did YouTube remove the time scrubber?

I've noticed this too. But the scrubber still shows up sometimes, and sometimes it doesn't. I think it's a bug.

In some other forum, I bemoaned that more and more apps seem to depend on having screen description enabled in VoiceOver in order to access even basic controls. The playback controls in the native Podcasts app is one egregious example. I don't use the iOS You Tube app, so I can't say for certain that this is the issue, but it's worth a try. It's in Settings, Accessibility, VoiceOver, VoiceOver recognition. After enabling it, turn it on and off with the rotor.

I use YouTube from Safari on a Mac with MacOS. In that environment, there's no real need to access the player scrubber because of the excellent keyboard controls. The number keys 1 through 9 jump you to 10% through 90% of the video.

Years ago, you could navigate through a YouTube video by the percentage, so you could go 10 20 or 30%.
It was particularly helpful for navigating long videos.
But now, it seems you can only do 30 second bursts, which is quite annoying for much longer videos, the double tap and hold to move doesn’t seem to work at all for me.

I noticed that when you double-tap the 'Video Player' button at the top left corner of the screen to hide the player controls, the time scrubber becomes usable. However, VoiceOver doesn't speak the percentile information when you scrub.

I have noticed that if you flick to a persons profile button and try to flick past it it loops through a couple of buttons so you have to use direct touch, touch anywhere and it should move on, I think then if you flick backwards you should find the scrubber.

There is a chance I'm not on the latest version of youtube as my phone doesn't auto update.