All the speculation and wondering leads to this, the reveal of the concept that I'll be doing when we reach 5000 tinglelings!!!
To listen while using other apps, switch the player to Picture-in-Picture (PiP) during playback — it keeps playing in a small floating window (the screen stays on).
To listen with the screen fully off, in-browser playback stops by YouTube's design. Open the video in the YouTube app to keep listening where background playback is supported (e.g. with YouTube Premium).
Open in YouTube app