I have YouTube Premium and I still have NewPipe installed because I don't always want the one-off videos I watch to affect my suggestions.
Also NewPipe has the ability to group the channels I watch.
The YouTube app defaults to auto-play on, and even after turning it off, sometimes it'll turn back on.
To delete things from my watch history requires me to remember to remove it. If I forget then I have to scroll through my history to find it. Not ideal.
Otherwise, if you send the content to my device for free, it is my right decide which parts to watch and which parts to skip.
The legality of publishing (and profiting from) ad-blocking software and what companies are allowed to do in order to interfere with ad-blocking is less clear.
But one thing for sure, while ad-blocking is your right, companies certainly don't have to make it easy.
Ads are a gamble, you bet your money that showing me a dumb clip will make me want your product. Guess what, you lost.
All video is streamed in blocks currently (HLS streaming mostly). So if they really want they would inject adds inside those blocks and the player won't be able to distinguish between ads blocks and video blocks. They can stop sending you blocks if you didn't get all the "ad blocks" beforehand for the duration of the ad. Even if your player "knows" because of a "Sponsor Block" database the interval it needs to skip, by not giving you the blocks beforehand you'd need to wait.
They can also give the stream only to DRM compliant players.
We may end up with some shadow YT libraries with ripped videos. Some distributed crypto hosting platform where the more you seed/rip, the more tokens you get for watching or something like that.
Includes crowdsourced sponsor block as well. The day YouTube goes the Twitch route and starts embedding ads is the day I stop using it. Literally unwatchable at this point without adblocking.
The mouse usually wins.
