YouTube can get itself special status and its parameters are predictable. You can in fact strip the tracking data while leaving the tiny data. So I don't know why YouTube would be the counter example
Sure, it'll happen to small sites too but there's solutions. Like always being able to restore or working with the community to create whitelists like you would for YouTube. Or enable a user generated whitelist and make it sharable. There's a lot of solutions here
Funny because YouTube is exactly the example I would use for the URL parameters being important. I frequently send links to specific times in the video using the `t` parameter.