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I use an adblock (uBlock Origin I think or something similar), and never see ads on YouTube.

May I also suggest mpsyt(mps-youtube). GPL cli YouTube interface that will open your player of choice. I hardly use the web interface anymore.

I wish goblin would take off.

What's goblin?

Do you mean https://mediagoblin.org/, or something else?

Yep, I meant mediagoblin.

youtube-dl this and tell me if you see an ad: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AMpZ0TGjbWE

I just tried and I saw one

That's a video of an ad, which is quite different from videos that aren't ads but have ads injected in to them by youtube.

If you want to watch videos of ads, of course you can do so. But if you want to avoid them you can do so as well, by using youtube-dl.