absolutely not… you can travel literally a thousand miles without hitting a router if you’re traveling transcontinental, whereas if you’re in a dorm in college and you live right next to an T1 node you can be hitting 15 different routers because your college actually uses a virtual network provider from the other side of town.

Hops absolutely does not correspond to distance in any reasonable sense. Youtube also buffers to avoid that transcode quality issue, so no you’re getting the quality you ask for, but the bitrate might be different depending on your physical internet speed. The distance has jack shit to do with it.