How do I circumvent the anti-afk built into Youtube's autoplay feature?

Question

I want to be able to listen to ASMR videos while getting to sleep and have it still playing when I wake up, but it appears youtube has some sort of anti-afk measure to prevent its autoplay from actually autoplaying. What's really frustrating is my Google-fu completely fails me because search results are overwhelmingly returning results on how to turn off autoplay, as you can imagine.

Two possible strategies come to mind to circumvent their anti-afk.

One is to use an anti-anti-afk autohotkey (or autoit) script usually used for gaming and repurpose it into tricking youtube's software into thinking I'm not afk. I tried writing a script that would press Esc every 5 or 6 seconds, but that didn't work. I could attempt to keep modifying it until I find an input youtube would recognize, but I could only really make an attempt once per day, since sleeping is the only time I'm ever actually reliably afk long enough for an asmr video to end.

The second idea is to not even rely on youtube's autoplay and instead make my own autoplay. Write a userscript that detects the end-screen of the youtube player, and with that as the trigger, loads the link to the video at the top of the suggested videos list on the right side of the screen. I, unfortunately, am not as familiar with writing userscripts.

Answer 1

I've personally never had any issue with this. I've had media computer running for days without realizing youtube was still on and I end up on entirely different videos or in a loop.

Generally as long as you're scrolled up all the way to the top, it should always autoplay. If you've scrolled down to the comments, autoplay will stop.

Alternatively you can make a playlist with all the videos you'd like to play upfront. This way you won't rely on the autoplay feature and it will just go through the playlist.