I hate ads.
That's it. That's all I wanted to say. Just loathe them with a burning passion. More than i do anything else in my day to day life. I feel an urge to scream it into the world every single day just how much i despise ads and whoever invented them.
I hate ads.
I can't escape them. I feel like i'm trapped in a sick psychological torture experiment. Can't even go outside for a walk without seeing them everywhere. This is not how human beings should live.
I hate ads.
Do the people who make ads not feel any shame for what they are doing? Stop trying to sell me your shit, i don't want it! I don't want to give you my money, stop trying to take it away from me!
I hate ads.
+1 yt-dlp is workhorse
The threat of server-side ads, as you mentioned, is concerning. I haven't looked into the proposed implementations, but it seems like the nature of HLS still leaves the door open for workarounds. It seems like yt encoding chunks on the fly with both content and ads so you wouldn't be able to filter chunks would be too much of a burden, and doing so statically would be too restrictive.
... Or maybe they'll just abandon open standards and they'll just do widevine 2.0 🤮