Youtubes changes are successful. Less people use ad blocker and more people are using yt premium.

There's so many people who dont want to constantly keep looking for work around and having their sites break etc. Once one person in their family buys yt premium then it makes sense for them to get a family plan.

My issue isn't with youtube running ads or charging for their service. My gripe is that they built their website as a free ad based service and out competed everything else based on that. Then they slowly ramped up ads and monetization once they had a monopoly and they won't stop squeezing.

In my eyes the only ethical solution is a distributed competitor where users can pay for the service of streaming videos but can't be forced into a single vendor. For example if one peertube instance started charging to much then you could move to another.