I already have a VPN and BitTorrent trackers I can rely on. I'm willing to (and do) pay for content. But I will not pay to watch ads. Amazon are scumbags who steal from small enterprises anyway; I almost welcome this motivation to deny them more of my money.
Those of us who know how to, and are willing to spend the time to, get around the current blocks are a comparatively small, potentially trivial, percentage of the YouTube viewing public.
And it'll take time for us to implement these changes for friends and family, during which time YouTube's ad revenue and subscription revenue will undoubtedly increase.
How much follow-through and ad-blocker installation that translated to, I have no idea. But it's fun to mock Google anyway.
But... I am one person Google drove away. I finally installed an alternative YouTube application simply because Google introduced never-ending ads that must be manually canceled every few minutes. I was OK with watching normal, TV-style ads. But Google crossed the line by basically halting playback of a program every few minutes and forcing you to herd it along over and over and over. I can't do that while I'm cooking.
Happy for this to be true