Google is heavily pushing YouTube premium now, so they're trying to make the experience as crappy as possible for free users.

I don't watch nearly enough YouTube to justify $12 a month, but I'm starting to consider ad blockers. Or just stop watching Youtube altogether, which wouldn't be all that hard. There are only a couple of channels I check out from time to time, and one isn't monetized so the ads are fairly reasonable. The other however had ad breaks every 5 minutes, which is just killing it for me.