It was a bit difficult, but to solve this problem:

1. First it was necessary to find the element which listens to user events which trigger this behaviour, by using Ctrl-Shift-C on YouTube player's element and then adding "pointer-events: 'none'" to its parent elements' CSS, until it disables this functionality.
2. The element that was listening for the events can be selected with document.querySelector('ytd-page-manager #player-container'); (it turns out there are multiple elements with player-container id on YouTube).
3. Then we get event listeners for this element by typing "getEventListeners(temp1)" in Chrome developer console (where temp1 is the 'ytd-page-manager #player-container' element after right clicking and choosing "store as a global variable")
4. Then we add our own event listener with Capture:true and stop immediate propagation for these events (it was enough to do for the "pointerdown" event)

So after the page has loaded the code would be

const container = document.querySelector('ytd-page-manager #player-container');
console.log(container)
container.addEventListener('pointerdown', (e) => {
    console.log(e.currentTarget);
    e.stopImmediatePropagation();
}, true)

We add "true" to the event listener to use Capture ("A boolean value indicating that events of this type will be dispatched to the registered listener before being dispatched to any EventTarget beneath it in the DOM tree" -- https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/API/EventTarget/addEventListener).