[alipendier]

1. I never faced such an issue and you are the only one with it. So I guess it's based on the set content provider (the addon)
2. I cannot disable your addons and I do not maintain the YouTube addon. The widgets are designed to be used with local media and mainly for smart playlists. If you decide to use a lot of widgets for addons, you have to deal with slowdowns and timeouts. That's a Kodi behaviour. It's not designed or optimized to run a lot of scripts and addons at the same time to fill a list.
3. Hardcoded. Not possible with a setting.

Thanks for the reply, its weird man because when those two widget groups got corrupted I went ahead and recreated them (identically) into new groups and the recreated ones work just fine, problem is that I now have two unusable widget groups.

I've seen other skins on youtube with the spinner changed (most likely would be Jarvis), I'll check further and post instructions here in case anybody finds it useful. Thanks