I consider myself a little techy, since I visit this site quite often. But for me YouTube is curing me from my addiction to it by ramping up its ad blocker blockers. I know I have to wait roughly the ad’s runtime looking at a frozen video before the video actually starts playing and it is often enough to let me go do something productive or useful instead. Thanks google :)

Yeah exactly, sometimes I just give up entirely. If it's a podcast I might persist, otherwise it's just not worth it.

The compromise for Google would be to limit ad-blocker users to a reduced quality version to save on bandwidth...

After using Peertube, it would make a lot of sense if pretty much all media assets went the way of decentralisation. It lowers bandwidth, reduces server overhead and increases availability.