This article is less about view counts dropping due to people abandoning the platform and more about view count spikes and troughs that are a consequence of the measure-countermeasure game of YouTube tweaking its code to account for ad blockers vs. ad blockers tweaking their code to account for YouTube ads.

Ad blockers (especially for complex sites and data streams) are basically like using a chainsaw to remove a mosquito(1); sometimes innocuous or beneficial features get omitted too because they're too "ad-shaped" for the heuristic.

(1) Anyone who thinks I'm under-selling the risks of unblocked ads has never seen the consequence of an unlucky bite from Aedes aegypti.

This is the last thread I would ever have expected to see those little striped monsters mentioned.

Not sure about the chainsaw analogy, but I guess Aedes Aegypti is a fair metaphor for the cumulative effect of the tiny daily (hourly?) annoyance of the free-with-ads model.