But yeah, if you use youtube a lot, at least premium does exist as a more morally righteous choice if you don't really care about the tracking side of things and are mostly just annoyed at ads themselves. Which I'd imagine is most people.
Uh, no.
With UBO and YT Premium, the only API calls that are blocked are:
www.youtube.com/generate_204 - seems to be to detect if client is online (since YT has a desktop offline mode)
www.youtube.com/api/stats/qoe (https://stackoverflow.com/a/68823010)
www.youtube.com/ptracking - general playback tracking
It's all first-party, no other ad trackers are loaded.
All of YouTube's tracking is done via your "watch history" which is via the api www.youtube.com/api/stats/watchtime. Most blockers don't block this since, as a user, you kind of expect the most useful features of YouTube to work - tracking how far into the video you've gotten (so you can return later at the same moment), and having your watch history be used to curate your recommended feed to give you more videos.