Did you tell your friend ads waste far more time than the 3-5 second delay you get on Firefox with ublock? I mean, I get someone would hesitate to install another extension like User-Agent Switcher because you don't really want to trust it, but even then just using ublock is still faster than watching ads.

If I spend half an hour to find an implement a workaround (because finding ways around YT's advertising is not my hobby) then I'd have to watch 60 unskippable 30 second ads to break even, every single time they upgrade their cat-and-mouse. I don't watch that much youtube in a month, probably not in 3 months.