I don't understand the mentality that everything on YouTube should be free. Sure, there's plenty of junk, but there are glorious slices that I am compelled to support, both via YouTube Premium and via Patreon where applicable.
What would replace YouTube if it didn't exist? Well, PeerTube gives an example of one possible direction, Discord (or IRC) another. YouTube's continued existence prevents any better alternatives from developing. It's squatting on the conceptual space for "where I go to watch short videos" and acting as a middle-man between me and creators, then using its monopoly over that connection to shaft us both.
This is part of the problem with YouTube. I watch a shitload of ads and the creators still cannot pay their bills.
And as the creation of the Universe was, so to was the web becoming the next advertising frontier widely considered a bad move. So get off my web, and go set up your monetized fiefdom elsewhere. This place was not meant for your ilk. Leave us, and take your shitty rip-off content syndication farms with you. Leave and sully our search indexes no more! Go and find your own damn playground.
Oh, wait, what's that? Don't want to move somewhere or build a network that requires opt-in to your shitty monetization schemes because you'd miss out on all the eyeballs that won't follow you?
Well... Now you know why we complain. Because your arse feels entitled to pollute the shit out of our indexes and poison our wells.
Who defined what web was meant to?
And you can read other parts as they were designed and added.
The problem with ads is that the ad-pushers basically forced people to use adblockers. In the early days, people put up with a few ads here and there as the cost of seeing stuff for free, plus ad-blockers didn't exist yet. But then the ad-pushers kept making the experience worse and worse, and the ads more and more intrusive and obnoxious. People invented ad-blockers, and as the ads got even worse (and even dangerous: many were laden with viruses), more and more people turned to ad-blockers, even if before they were ambivalent or even wanted to support the advertising model.
This story is as old as the WWW. It's the same thing now. YouTube ads weren't that bad before, but as several comments here have noted, they're getting worse and worse. So before, only die-hard ad-haters would employ ad-blockers, but now the advertisers are pushing more people to use them.
Collectively, those two things make the ads on YouTube infuriating. It's then made worse by the ramp up in the volume of ads. Either work with content creators on when ads are displayed to make the content and ad experience better (a la tv) or come up with a different method. And for the love go god, git rid of those stupid ads that pop over the content.