I pay for YouTube premium, and my experience is fairly smooth.
Also are you just skipping sponsor breaks manually? I use premium but it only covers adblocking really.
It’s amazing how UX hostile companies can get when they don’t have real competition.
Wrt auto-dubs, they can be turned off. To me this feels less deliberately hostile on YT's part and more tunnel vision where they assumed everyone would find this to be a helpful feature and didn't even think about adding a user-level preference to disable it.
But also I find user-level preferences kinda an anti-pattern anyway. Would be nice if you disable it for one video and it just remembers that preference for the next one (or vice versa).