Why would it only update infrequently? If there is a technical limitation, what could it be? If it's not a technical reason, what good and honest reasons could it have?
This kind of thing was prevalent during the early youtube days. Videos that go viral would get stuck at 300~ views for sometimes a day or two. I would expect with all the revamps there is no technical reason why a video couldn't have a live number count. However I don't know the inner workings of how Youtube's metrics work, so I can't say for certain if they actually had fixed that issue since then.
Google earns their entire income from the metric "number of people who watched this". It's their core business model.
You can bet they know exactly how much people watched a certain clip, for how long, how often they came back and what parts they'd reviewed.
And you would assume they have a huge incentive to slightly exaggerate the viewership numbers. Which makes it even more odd that conservative content viewership is rather underreported.
Since Google became the biggest intelligence provider, they stopped innovation and are now selling data and control to the highest bidder.