[mozempthrowaway]

The bar for how savvy you have to be to use an ad blocker is a lot lower than it used to be.

There’s 2 different issues here: privacy and user experience. A lot of YT users are probably signed in to YT through their gmail/google account, in which case the ad blocker is not providing them privacy. If you don’t care about privacy and only care about user experience (e.g. not seeing any ads) there will not be an alternative to YT for long that can operate free to the user without showing ads.

Most people will opt for a better content catalog, load times, and device battery life over leaving YT, even the computer savvy.