I hopped on the youtube premium train a long time back, just because I mainly used youtube to consume podcasts and the like and it paid my creators better and got me no ads on youtube anywhere. The first time these BS policies hit me, a paying user, I will cancel it and never look back.
The official statement from Google included in the article makes it seem like Google is de facto fine with paid YouTube Premium subscribers using ad blockers, whether or not the legalese officially allows that. That makes sense since they wouldn’t be showing you ads anyway. So I doubt they’ll be targeting you with this new policy.
Do they prevent relevant data collection by YouTube for people who are logged into YouTube Premium accounts? I doubt it. This is still a first-party data collection context, not a third-party one, and YouTube controls both (enough of) the client and the server.
Anyway, all we have to go here is Google's public statement and their public actions. Nobody who actually knows YouTube's internal thoughts on this topic would be discussing them here. And so far their public statement as quoted in the article lists signing up for YouTube Premium as the acceptable alternative to turning off the ad blocker.
(Disclosure: I did work for Google in the past, but never for YouTube, and not in over 8 years. Of course I don't know their internal thoughts on this topic, and I'm only speaking for myself here.)
Lots of reasons, chief of which being, I primarily consume them at my desk on my spare monitor, and the ones I follow usually have some visual stuff to check out.
Couple that with being a programmer, and I get a lot of mileage out of youtube.
