Not that Google needs any more cash, but ReVanced has to be the absolute worst defense for maintaining openness on Android. As in, you could have cited the thousands of legitimate apps that have nothing to do with circumventing a pretty reasonable subscription (compared to other media subscriptions out there) for Google's own app.

The deal with Youtube was always presented as "You watch a couple ads, we show you a couple videos"

Google has dramatically altered that deal, and now shows much longer, less-likely-to-be-skippable ads, with much higher frequency.

Calling it "a prety reasonable subscription" is only reasonable if we forget that this wasn't the deal originally offered

Furthermore, this is a massive corporation closing up a project that got it's start by selling itself to geeks as Open.

It is Google's OS, and it is Google's app, but closing up the Open project to advantage their own app sure as hell feels like poor form

Not paying for Premium is pretty cheesy but Revanced also fixes a number of hostile UX changes to YouTube no subscription let you escape normally.

It also allows you to patch other apps to make them work the way you want.

I disagree that it's a bad defense. It demonstrates well how reduced openness will allow Google to abuse its monopoly even more. It shouldn't be any business of the maker of my phone to support the business model of the most popular video sharing website.