It's harder for me to get upset at instances of alleged corporate bullying when the result is clearly pro-user. If YouTube allowed video authors to opt out of Red, their only reasonable option (short of turning into a charity for said authors) would be to show Red subscribers those videos with ads. For a user, a service that's only "mostly" ad-free is only a pale imitation of the real thing - especially if labels decide to opt out en masse as a bargaining chip, and "mostly" starts to look a lot more like "largely" or "partly". Not a good way for Google to keep subscribers (who might turn to ad blockers instead), obnoxious for subscribers, and probably ultimately detrimental to the creators.