I'm pretty sure that the "301+ views" being for "verification" wasn't the entire story. What likely happened was that the first 300 views were recorded inline i

I'm pretty sure that the "301+ views" being for "verification" wasn't the entire story. What likely happened was that the first 300 views were recorded inline in the record for the video, while views beyond that were regularly updated in a batch job that included some anti-bot scanning. You don't want to be updating an unsharded counter at YouTube scale, but they had a tradeoff where you could count the first few hundred views (which were likely low-concurrency) in an unscalable manner.