Honestly, just don't go to that part of the Internet unless you absolutely have to. YouTube is a great resource for information, but it sucks as entertainment.
Because the uploaders are doing it for free and it's been working the way it currently has been, free for 20 years.
If YT had made it their monetization scheme to charge users for an account - by all means. They did not, they set up the expectation of their product that it is free*.
with ads, which they show on repeat and do nothing but waste the users time. There's no reason why we can't use an adblock. If the uploader or YT wants compensation, they have ways of obtaining that, either via donations, patronship, or premium accounts.
There is no reason that YouTube should suddenly be for pay or forced ads to use it. If they wanted that, they should have started out like that. If they wanted to not run at a loss, they should have planned for that. They did not, and it's not on the users to suddenly make up for that shortsightedness.
Tl;Dr, while you can set up a foundation and decide to change it decades later doesn't mean anything. The expectation from the users has already been set.
But YouTube DOES have advertising and they have had advertising for a decade, everyone that uploads content knows this and accepts it and in many cases is able to monetize their own content. You are arguing that you are entitled to use third party software to personally avoid ads, and your only argument for it is that you've been doing it a long time.
Then google should have done a better job vetting the ads so they don't have malicious redirects or malware so that users wouldn't feel the need to run adblocks to be safe.
In fact, Google as the most pervasive advertiser should probably have done that for all ads. I imagine if they weren't so terrible, ad-blocks wouldn't be so prevalent.
It shouldn't necessarily be free, but the information about whether or not I've seen their ad is privileged. AdBlock detection is an invasion of my privacy and therefore AdBlock blocking must be circumvented.
That sounds like a you problem, honestly. Tons of great channels out there for basically any interest. Do you just, like, only ever look at the front page without logging in? Like just at the absolute lowest common denominator clickbait stuff?
How did you get that from that? You said it sucks for entertainment, I said it doesn't and you get from that that I can't fathom not being on YouTube 24/7?