Hopefully not off topic: I continue to be surprised at how many of my friends don't pay for an ad-free YouTube (virtually all of them!). For about $15/month my wife and I get YouTube Music that includes ad-free (but content creators sometimes embed their own ads) YouTube. A bonus: when listening to old music from my youth, I am surprised at how often they have old videos available of the bands playing.
Worse, there's whole cadres of reviewers, mainly in tech, who have created a weird feedback loop causing their entire videos to be subtle ads. Reviewer gets popular, reviewer quits job to youtube full time, reviewer needs to get early access to make reviews, reviewer is told what they can and can't say by mfg. Mess up or give negative review, they'll never get another early access from said company. So their entire job has become to basically advertise.
There's a few channels I'll watch that I trust, like Project Farm, VCG, a couple carpentry ones I don't remember the name of. The thing in common is they mostly seem to be older guys and/or people just making videos for fun.
If you have both adblock and sponsorblock you can pretty much have a completely ad-free experience.
But at that point, is it fair to the creators? I guess as long as not enough people are aware then it's not a problem; though obviously not a solution.
In reality, the whole "creator economy" that's based on using the creators influence to sell products (which btw are almost always unrelated to what the creator actually does) seems to me like a problematic way of finding art and content.
Yes? They choose to put out videos with sponsored segments/ads instead of asking for payment up front because that gets them more money. If it no longer gets them more money they can choose differently.
If the proportion of users leaving is lower than the proportion increase in income, YouTube wins.