I don't know how many youtube users are paying for it, but youtube premium is still a thing, and I hope it continues to be. Seems like they're making it work somehow.
On one hand, that sounds miserable. Only 1% of the users are paying! On the other hand, a Premium subscriber is an order of magnitude more profitable. The ads run rate seems to be about $20B/year, and subscriptions behind at just a factor of 5 at about $4B/year.
(The $20B is a hard number from the Q3 earnings, $4B is back of the envelope. It's hard to say just how e.g. regional pricing if affecting it, or how the family plans are counted.)
I mostly prefer to watch DVDs and employ an ad blocker so that every day existence doesn't require my brain to edit ads out of reality because it's been trained by 25 years of abuse from the internet that this is necessary to just be able pretend like I exist independent of my eyeballs' worth to some goddamn shysters halfway across the world. You know, like most of 400,000 years of human existence.
Come to think of it, maybe I'll sign off now.
Also remember those ads are not free, they come at great cost of bandwidth and compute, resulting in net co2 emission. If I as a user want to object to that, using an ad blocker is morally completely valid.