When you open a video in the YouTube app it only has to download just the video itself. The app already contains the code for the YouTube site, the player, etc. (also possibly because the app can use more optimizations by virtue of being native code, but not positive on that)
When you open a YouTube video in Safari, before it can even start loading the video it has to first download the code for the YouTube site/player/etc as well, that code then has to load the video, etc. so there are more network requests involved.
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