There is the option to use YouTube Premium though. It's not too expensive (yet), and with the number of cooking and tech videos I'm consuming right now, it seems worth it.
It does, however, reward content creators for their efforts (at about 100x the value of an ad view). That makes it far superior to NewPipe and ytdl, to me.
I'd sooner buy channel merch and let a tshirt company take a middleman cut than let google take that middleman cut. Patreon being the middleman is also preferable to further enriching google.
I think this is really moving the goalposts. It seems like a lot of people who are vehemently anti advertising and ask for alternatives aren't really interested in them. Being anti advertising is totally understandable, but it's weird to see people who don't truly want to pay for ad free content talk about how invasive ads are.
Why not use Youtube Red with ublock then? Google still tracks what you watch on your account, but I'm assuming if you are a frequent user you already have one to keep track of subscriptions etc.
