Do you still think it’s reasonable that it should be a legal requirement that to embed a video on your web page you must develop your own video delivery infrastructure?
I think the important part is that this is an issue, only because companies like have had a surprising hard time not misusing every single bit of information sent their way. The result is that companies have forced governments to step in and now they are overregulating.
If you do not request preload behavior, then you’re just linking another site on the web, and users are considered to understand that links go to other sites, and that’s acceptable. A theoretical GDPR complaint would find that the user agent was responsible for the behavior, not you as site operator.
(I am not your lawyer, this is not legal advice.)
I already agreed in a comment above that these questions wrongly answered by a pure privacy maximizing position carry a huge danger for the german web.
maybe just use software to fix the problem instead of spreading FUD. HuGe DaNgEr