YouTube ads have gotten out of control right?

I never see the ads with uBlock Origin on Firefox. It's even available on the Firefox Android app, but on mobile I find Newpipe from F-Droid is a better experience. I haven't tried SponsorBlock, but I've heard it uses crowdsourced data to automatically skip the sponsor sections of videos.

I’ve given up and started paying a monthly subscription. Their premium comes with nice features.

I wish I were able to turn off shorts.

Just download what you want to watch with yt-dlp: https://github.com/yt-dlp/yt-dlp

And never see another youtube ad (other than ads the creators directly include as part of the video stream itself).

I use Brave exclusively now for YT. It’s heavenly to have zero ads. I was just about to give up on the platform because I can’t abide looking at ads. I’m nuts. I actually point the phone away from me while the ad is playing so I don’t get exposed to it. If I can manage to not ever catch even a single glimpse of the ad and not even detect what’s it’s for, I feel I’ve succeeded.

But now using Brave I don’t have to bother with any of that.

I get them every 5 minutes at times, sometimes two in a row, and they can be long. It's random.

It's pushing me to switch to paid platforms for my regulars.

Yes. I have had youtube red for a few years now, it includes the music service which makes it reasonable for me. Downloading videos is a convenient premium feature that I use occasionally when flying.

I really notice how bad YT is without red when trying to watch something on my work computer, I would rather watch on my phone than with ads every few minutes.

Yea Youtube's really going to hell ever since Elon took over :(