So the net result of taking media away from legacy industries and handing it over to tech is (1) unskippable ads, (2) surveillance, (3) censorship and revocation of media you don't physically own, and now (4) unpausable media.
No. First, legacy industries didn't have media "taken away" from them. They simply refused to adapt to new technology quickly enough, so new media (WWW) became popular, which replaced the old media the legacy industries were working with (newsprint, OTA TV).
1. a. You can skip ads using an ad-blocker. They work extremely well. Lots of people refuse to educate themselves about them, and even when their tech-savvy friend shows it to them or even installs one for them, they don't use it.
1. b. The legacy industries didn't let you skip ads either: if you were reading a newspaper, the ad was right there next to the text. If you were watching TV, you had to sit through commercials (which were generally timed to appear at the same time on all stations, so you couldn't change channels to avoid them). DVRs didn't come about until much later.
3. "censorship": Legacy industries only printed or aired stuff they wanted you to see, and since there were only a small handful of choices, that wasn't much.
revocation: the tech companies haven't taken anything away. You can still buy CDs and Blu-Rays, but people choose to subscribe to streaming services instead. Also, you can download anything you want from YouTube with yt-dlp.
4. This isn't unpausable, they just show ads during pauses (if you refuse to use an ad-blocker).
Of course, the worse they make the ads, the more people turn to ad-blockers. Back when ads were new, no one really cared much about a banner ad here or there. But then the advertisers came up with pop-up ads, and users (rightfully) revolted, and tools to block these ads were devised, even building them directly into web browsers because these pop-ups were so awful. The same is happening now, I believe: YouTube ads weren't so annoying in the past, only showing at the video start, but now they inject 30-minute ads at random times, so more and more users are turning to blockers.
They could embed the ad in the video stream. It would be a pita to circumvent. Essentially you'd need to record the video and fast skip the ads.
This did used to suck, but it’s been more a case of the YouTube Shorts player being very behind TikTok and the regular YouTube player and they’ve only slowly made changes. I would argue they took too long to make these QoL improvements, but they did make them.
Like, there is no 'ad viewing history' either.
I guess the ad industry does not care about useful at all nowadays.
Older commercials was filled with stats, properties and arguments. Like a TV shop channel. Nowadays it mainly seems to be some Amazon sellers that try to convince you with that tactic.