You can pay for Youtube Premium right now and the ads go away. For a long time, my criticism was that Youtube Premium is needlessly bundled with Youtube Music,

You can pay for Youtube Premium right now and the ads go away. For a long time, my criticism was that Youtube Premium is needlessly bundled with Youtube Music, which is redundant for me as a Spotify user and which I refused to pay for accordingly. Now, in at least a few countries, there's "Youtube Premium Lite", which is basically regular Youtube but without ads. If you live in one of these, in my view that's close to the ideal scenario: Everybody gets to choose between watching ads and paying.