It doesn’t really matter if it’s legally piracy or not

You’re right, it absolutely doesn’t, which is why it’s so weird to me that Linus makes a big deal about it.

then you’re just freeloading

Which is why I either donate to channels I like or buy their merch. They get way more than if I wasn’t blocking ads, and I don’t have to support a company that manipulates people with ads. So I guess at the end of the day I’m “stealing” from YouTube, and I guess I’m okay with that. If they offered good value for their premium service, I’d pay. But they don’t, so I just use an ad-blocker to get the thing I care about. I refuse to let them harvest my personal data, and that’s basically what their advertising is designed to do. I’d disable my ad-blocker if their ads were provably not tracking me, but I know that to not be true.

I’m not against paying for things. I pay for Nebula, my email (Tuta), and some other alternatives to Google products, I just refuse to pay for artificial limitations. YouTube Premium sucks for my intended use-case (download news to listen to on my commute, and occasionally listen to music while doing chores), and it’s not worth the $10 or whatever they charge for it. If they offered a lower tier (say, something based on watch-time), I might pay for it, more out of guilt than anything, but it needs to be a fair price. About half the channels I regularly watch are on Nebula or Odyssee, so I wouldn’t miss too much if they blocked my access to it.