I wish it were more effective in removing Youtube ads on my kids' iPads, but I understand it's a tall order. At least it gets rid of ads in most other apps.
The extra benefits are - play video with the screen off to listen to lectures - youtube music - specifically good for letting the toddler hear the wiggles without having to watch a wiggles video on youtube
I also pay hulu for no ads. I'm happy for the opportunity to pay directly for entertainment instead of with my eyeballs. No way to opt out of tracking, though, hence the pihole.
I like how you phrased this as a solved engineering problem.
I block ads at the application layer, DNS based ad blocking doesn’t really do it anymore and can create another troubleshooting surface to consider when it breaks something.
-- mostly: out of about 7 videos, an ad was shown to me at the start of one of them, but that is much better than mobile Safari, on which and ad is shown to me at the start of every video I start.
Thanks for the tip.