Google doesn't give a shit what their advertisers think. It's not a "please buy our ads" situation, it's a "where else would you advertise online, you stupid fuck?" type of situation.
Google reached that position by keeping the platform pleasant till no one else was left standing. That should be an antitrust activity in any free market. Remember this when you see Google gaslighting you about the moral implications of using adblocks.
People that were running ad blockers were not seeing ads and business owners were not paying for those blocked ads. So I don't see why they would care at all.
True, but people who used to be served one ad per video are now being served 4 or 5, which both lessens the value of each individual ad, and gives more incentive to get rid of them with premium
GAGTGF?
I have no idea what this means, but I feel like it's probably something I'd like in my back pocket to pull out and throw in someone's face....kinda like pocket sand.
I use Hetzner's Storage Share (which is a nextcloud instance) as my drive and pay around 5€ / mo for 1 TB. Depending on the features you want you could also use their Storage Box which is more like a plain network drive, and cheaper.. like 13€ / mo for 5 TB.
I've had YouTube premium from the inception of their subscription model prior to/at the beginning of YouTube red, as I initially had a paid Google music subscription.
Personally, there isn't a better option for the amount of hassle involved in my opinion. It's a family account, and managing so many people's YouTube experiences on at least a dozen different devices would be a nightmare I don't want to think about. (Multiple of each TV's, Roku's, Android phones, iPhones, pc's, etc)
This isn't really relevant to your friend, it is quite silly when it's just one person not willing to do it for just themselves.