Agreed. That said, YouTube Premium doesn't remove sponsor segments in videos, and these days many videos include a long segment about their sponsor of the day or their merch/patreon.
For this, I've recently discovered the Chrome extension SponsorBlock[1], which relies on user-submitted segments to auto-skip all kinds of off-topic segments in the video. You can choose to keep, skip, or mute segments like intros, sponsor promo, subscription reminders, and more. This metadata is not available on every single video, but in my experience it has made a huge difference in the amount of ads and repetitive reminders I see. Many videos get segment updates very quickly.
I'm a YouTube Premium subscriber, but the one thing that would make me feel good about the subscription would be a way to block channels that show sponsored ads, even manually -- I pay money to avoid ads, and I understand that they can't, or choose not to, mark those videos that have ads anyway, but give me the tools to do it myself. (It looks like this might be possible in a browser, but Apple TV is my primary client, and the Apple TV app gets actively worse with each release...)
For this, I've recently discovered the Chrome extension SponsorBlock[1], which relies on user-submitted segments to auto-skip all kinds of off-topic segments in the video. You can choose to keep, skip, or mute segments like intros, sponsor promo, subscription reminders, and more. This metadata is not available on every single video, but in my experience it has made a huge difference in the amount of ads and repetitive reminders I see. Many videos get segment updates very quickly.
[1] https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/sponsorblock-for-y...