1.) No. It is not (Short answer, in direct response to your question).
2.) Not linking directly to YouTube videos is actually ahead of the curve not behind it.
3.) Your current pactice to date of not linking directly to YouTube videos has a lot of benefits to your readers whether they bother to directly appreciate it or not. Here are some reasons for that, and facilities waiting for you, as a #Fedizen in the #Fediverse, and one who can appreciate the protection of people's privacy and data integrity free of being quantified by industrial data and privacy mining engines:
PeerTube is a great resource, and you can link directly to any video hosted on PeerTube. Not only that but #PeerTube has facilities to quickly clone any YouTube VoD (check the license at YouTube or contact the Copyright owner (creator/publisher) directly if they didn't take the time to avoid the default YouTube license.
If you're the publisher/creator of the VoD then what some folks do is to upload part of it to YouTube with a big splash banner alerting the viewer to visit a particular URL to the PeerTube instance (Many also specify Odysee) video. There are a lot of very prominent so-called YouTube influencers or creators that do this as standard practice, even splitting their videos into two versions - the beginning, which is on YouTube, and the rest of the video which is hosted somewhere else in its entirety, and this works very well for them.
If it's not your creation, then there's a few #FOSS tools to instantly convert a YouTube URL to a VoD into an Invidious URL to stream the video. What's especially awesome about doing it this way, is that, on almost all Fediverse platforms, even the decrepit stock mastodon instances, a very pretty link preview of the video is presnted, and most Fediverse platforms even support an embedded player experience right there in your stream so you never have to leave your Fediverse client.
Following up on that last suggestion, is the fact that when you post an invidious link to a video anyone who clicks through to view it can simply click on the download button, choose the quality of the video, and voila! They now have a local copy for themselves!
NOTE: There are a lot of invidious servers across the Internet, I recommend choosing a good stable one that's been around for a while, and using that one by setting up a shortcut for yourself (you only need to insert the YouTube ID in the URL). If anything ever happens to that server you can quickly replace the actual Invidious instance for all of your vids :)
So again, to recap what I said in response to your poll, No. You're not behind the curve at all, you're a #pathfinder, ahead of the curve, doing your part to respect the privacy of others who may otherwise be deprived of the content that you publish.
As a #Privacy conscious publisher and obviously, a member of the Fediverse thank you for your commitment to user safety and the protection of their own Intellectual property and privacy, free from the tracking and privacy mining operations of the deprecated, monolithic silos!
