discord with roughly 30 million daily users getting 1.4 billion views on their video is pretty funny
my theory is that discord is specifically exempt because of their “watch together” feature where they partnered with youtube to have a special feautre where people can watch video synced together on VC. perhaps as part of that, views in those embeds actually get counted.
there’s a lot of people saying that the video was view botted, but if you hovered over the card at the bottom a video would pop up that would play on loop,
so your theory makes sense in this context i suppose