What evidence is there that Google is specifically storing it? Wouldn't that violate GDPR?

Yes. But they aren't abiding by COPPA either so... (last week news, search for YouTube + COPPA).

Read the privacy policy, they explicitly state they store it. Obviously, because in many cases they need to know who watched that. For instance for their licenses they need to be allowed to show you copyrighted content.

You can ‘pause history’ which means ‘If you turn off your YouTube watch history and have no significant prior watch history, YouTube features that rely on your watch history to give video recommendations, like recommendations on the YouTube homepage, are removed.’ it doesn’t mean they don’t store it.

Google stores everything and deletes nothing. If you don’t want Google to keep track of information, you have to make sure they don’t have it and never get it.

> Google stores everything and deletes nothing. If you don’t want Google to keep track of information, you have to make sure they don’t have it and never get it.

This would be a clear GDPR violation. This isn't the 2000s or 2010s any more.

If you're right, you can easily earn big amount of money by filing a GDPR complaint or suing Google for lying about privacy.

If my country either took privacy seriously or took corporate malfeasance seriously, then Google wouldn't exist in the first place. Here's to hoping, though.