The internet is unbearable with ads. If a browser doesn't filter ads well it's unsuitable for use in 2023. If Chrome can't block YouTube ads anymore, then it's just not even a contender. The normies tend to lag a little with these things, but it won't be long before "Firefox is the one that works on YouTube" is common tech trivia.
Now Google is repeating Microsoft's mistakes here. The more miserable the ad experience, the stronger the incentive to do something about that. And when the solution is "Install Firefox, add uBlock Origin, Tada!", there are just going to be a lot of people that will figure out how to never see ads again. Firefox works on mobile as well and runs Youtube without ads just fine there. Think about that next time you are forced to watch an ad in the Youtube app on your phone.
The irony with Youtube is that ads are just a part of the revenue stream. They also get a revenue share on sponsoring deals and a few other things. Which for most youtubers is actually their main income stream. Ads are just the cherry on the cake. Which is why Google can't just kill off browser support or move everything to premium/paid accounts. They'd lose a lot of their viewers and revenue. And as a consequence, potentially some of their content creators even. Google is completely dependent on external content providers and viewers keeping the revenue going. No content, no views, no revenue. That's why they have to keep the platform such that it maximizes exposure for good videos.
Same with Android TV: most people accept the default launcher that serves ads and pushes content constantly. It takes some work to change the default launcher, but people won't even try. They accept it.
I pray every day that Manifest V3 will be the beginning of the end for Chrome, because it cripples ad blocking in an unacceptable way. But I very much doubt it will happen.
The blocking per se works.
I like being logged in because I like to track what I've watched. So it's annoying to lose that when logging out. It'd be nice to have an extension that provides watch history independently of YouTube, so that I don't need to login.
That being said I do get quite some ads on Twitch(and I know there's solutions to this, but they're separate from uBlock origin and I have to keep updating them cause they keep breaking so I stop caring sometimes). The way I solve it there is to just have 2 different streams open in 2 different tabs, one of them muted, as soon as ads start I switch to the different stream.