That's definitely a technique to keep in reserve if they get better at detection, but uBlock Origin currently works very well on Youtube as long as its filters are up to date.
If i'm logged in it fails constantly when i'm logged in (a few videos daily seem to work ok, after that it refuses to load a video, even though a "anti adblock" popup is still blocked)
...but it seems to work ok in incognito tabs, so youtube gets even less data on me now.
ublock origin folks have asked people to not run any other blocker extension alongside, those seem to trigger the anti-adblock scripts. It might be the same case for you.
