I think sadly there are no good solutions here. YouTube did a very very good job of hosting videos for everyone, and for a long long time didn't care about adbl

I think sadly there are no good solutions here. YouTube did a very very good job of hosting videos for everyone, and for a long long time didn't care about adblock or ytdl. All that might be fine if relatively few people used it (hence ytdl type tools were cli only and not some flashy GUI). But the usage of adblockers is rising (for all the good reasons, modern web with ads is horrible), so YouTube needs to do this at some point. They can't wait till adblocker usage is >50% since then it would be near impossible. YouTube premium exists, and is very good value. And hosting videos is really expensive, e.g. https://www.theverge.com/2022/3/15/22979126/vimeo-patreon-creators-price-increase https://www.theverge.com/2022/3/15/22979126/vimeo-patreon-cr.... Sadly what might happen in the end in the far future is youtube usable only with a login and with some kind of a subscription/one off transfer or ads. Some kind of netflix type solution, which is worse for everyone but hard to complain about.