YouTube ads are wholly avoidable. I still use the deprecated YouTube Vanced but there are many alternatives like it coming including ReVanced.

https://github.com/revanced

Not only that but with SponsorBlock (integrated in Vanced) you can even automatically skip promotional parts of the videos, intros, outros. The experience is excellent.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SponsorBlock

1Blocker on iOS has a safari extension that specifically targets YouTube ads [0]. The only caveat is that you need to use Safari and not YouTube’s native app.

[0] https://backstage.1blocker.com/how-to-block-youtube-ads-in-s...

Brave filters out those for me pretty well - in fact that's most of what I use it for, FF + UBlock is my default browser on Android, but doesn't do quite as well with Youtube (and then I am using Nextdns via Private DNS for system-wide blocking).