The sad truth is on average advertisers will pay more for your attention than you’ll pay not to have ads. So people continually complain about YouTube ads but ignore their option to pay to have them removed.
I agree that on the whole, people will continue to go for the free option, but I'm just glad that some options are appearing to pay, which rebalances the incentives a bit.
Yeah, I should use a hacked rooted Android yadda yadda. But I just spent a week hacking and hawking for my life in an ICU, and I certainly didn’t want sanity-saving podcasts to shut down whilst on an hour-long stay at the breathing machine. Life is short.