You can still watch YouTube without the view, I believe. If you use most desktop players, I think many of the calls it expects are skipped. Especially if you use youtube-dl, I think it retrieves the video URL directly. VLC, etc. should be enough to circumvent the view counter, unless YouTube really looks at how much of the video was downloaded. It's probably easy enough to give this a try if someone would find a video with a low view count, or maybe upload on one's own channel, and watches it with VLC. If it doesn't add to the view count, I think it should be pretty conclusive that this works.

But, apart from social media stats, I am not sure what view count really does. Bragging rights? In the end, it's about ads, I think.

If someone has confirmed if this works, drop a comment.