I have and will keep financially supporting software I find useful. However, I do agree that it's questionable whether you can easily replace Google as a source of funding.
There's always SOMETHING that's morally unacceptable to people who want it for free - I bet even full, total, complete submissions to whims of such community would not result in any significant revenue.
Reminds me of the crypto controversy of 2 years back. Mozilla had been allowing crypto donations for as long as they existed.
But then some important ex-employee "rediscovered" this, virtue signaled on Twitter how wildly inappropriate this is and formed a mob powerful enough to make Mozilla take the bow and close crypto donations.
And now? Well, now there won't be crypto donations. The same amount of crypto is mined, just none of it donated to Mozilla. You've achieved less than nothing, but you did the virtuous thing. Whilst simultaneously being funded by Google, with a laundry list of ethical violations, but those "don't count".
If you watch YouTube you presumably find it useful too?
Also, what about content creators? They get paid off the money Google gets from YouTube.
The problem is they want it both ways: they want to give it out for free, but with annoying ads, but then they get mad when people don't look at the ads.
Where I live, people regularly stand on the street in busy pedestrian areas and hand out free packets of tissues with a piece of paper on top advertising some business. These businesses aren't clamoring for laws or some technical means to force people to look at the ads closely; people routinely take the tissues, toss out the ad, and use the tissues, and it's ok. But according to many, many HN users with stockholm syndrome, not reading these ads closely and just trashing them is somehow "stealing", because that tissue took resources and a factory to make.
They aren't tracking your eyes and pause the video if you aren't watching the screen. Not saying they wouldn't do that if it was feasible...
They are annoyed that you are actively preventing them from playing out the ads in the first place, and they offered an alternative, to pay for not having the ads, at what is in my opinion a very reasonable price concidering the vast array of content you have access to on YouTube.
So they are effectively making the implicit contract explicit. Watch with ads or pay for no ads, otherwise you can happily choose to not use YouTube.
If you really think hosting video is cheap, make an alternative to YouTube.
Classic monopolistic behaviour.
You can't have your cake and eat it, Google neither and they will get what's coming but this is not the battle to pick, they do far worse than put ads on a video sharing platform