YouTube went slicing the salami to display more ads over time. It got to a point where I decided to pay them for the "Premium Lite" subscription since the only feature I wanted was "no ads", I didn't care about downloads, YouTube Music, or whatever other offerings they have, I just wanted no ads and was happily paying for it.

Then they killed that subscription tier, I just got an email with 30-day notice that my Premium Lite subscription wouldn't exist anymore and I had to upgrade to Premium, that was the last straw and I'm happily using ad blockers and will continue using it for as long as they work.

I tried to pay for it, they fucked me over, I have no ethical issues with using an ad blocker, it's the only power I have left.

That's the core issue, they slowly degraded the experience to show more ads while also removing ways to pay for a no ads feature without the cruft of other unnecessary features, I won't pay for them.