In some ways (not all ways, corporate greed also plays a part) this is just a byproduct of our own self-entitlement, a monster of our own creation. We expect to get so much for free nowadays as far as online content is concerned and yet we forget that all the backend services have to be paid for... so they put in ads to pay for them... and we block them with ad blockers... so they have to put in more unskippable, mid-roll ads... and we block them... so they have to charge a subscriptions, and we hack it or share passwords.... so they have to put the prices up...etc etc etc...
The developers, the machine room leasing, the server costs, the maintenance costs, the upgrade costs, the electricity costs, all the people performing these tasks... this all has to get paid... and every year everyone wants a pay rise.
Yet we still think we should be given this stuff for free and resent having to watch a few adverts in order to pay for it?
I'm not a YouTube Premium subscriber. I don't even have a Google account (deleted many years ago).
I agree with you. Running a service like YouTube costs a huge amount of money. The majority of users don't understand how expensive is to manage it.
And I'm not only talking about viewers. Content creators too often miss this important point. If all of those more or less silly youtubers out there had to cover the costs by themselves (running a mini personal YouTube-like website, so to speak), only a small portion would survive. Anyone else will disappear within a few weeks.
Yet sometimes they dare to complain too. Granted, they create contents, and often make an investment in order to produce the videos (audio/video stuff, editing software, lighting, ...). Still, Google provides them for free storage, CDN, player, apps, comments, live streaming, chat, thumbnails, captions, analytics, maintenance developers, etc.
The CDN part alone takes a tremendous amount of money.
Basically it's the only big video service on the market. For good reason: economically is almost impossible to deal with. Any other alternative (paid or free) either didn't succeed or is covering a niche segment in comparison.
To some extent Google is even generous and kind: every ad is pre-announced. They could inject ads in the stream without giving the ad-blockers the possibility to block them in advance if they wanted. Maybe only an AI-powered ad-blocker could remove the ads with a little pre-buffering to analyze and spot the ads in almost real time.
The same goes for social media. All those servers running day and night cost a lot of money. People should start to keep in mind this aspect and whine less.
Don't get me wrong: I don't like ads either. I pay for services if I consider them useful, though, because I know that otherwise it's an unsustainable practice.