I 100% agree. Right now, people are just kind of mildly irritated. My irritation is more than mild, hence my leaving entirely.

I'm just speculating now, but it's possible that the Google anti-trust might result in YouTube spinning off again. If they also see that coming, they might be trying to backstop it while they still have time and resources to try things (cutting off adblockers, increasing premium fees, they already changed how rev-sharing eligibility and payouts work, etc).

There's a high chance that they're going to make the wrong move and piss everyone off, or people will just stop putting up with 2 minutes of unskippable ads before, then again during, then after each video. Content will start getting pirated en masse, advertiserzers will drop (or pay less, or force even more ads to compensate, which is what already happened), and the cycle will continue and get worse until the service just collapses under it's own weight.

Something will take it's place. Probably multiple things. I just hope federated services are among them. Hell, people adopted Crypto ferociously, which was extremely expensive and completely useless. Even if federated video is expensive, at least it does something.