At least the sponsored segments can almost automatically be skipped now. If you press forward on the remote it will jump ahead of the sponsored bit. A little annoying that I have to actively skip it but still better than watching them.

Dunno, big corporations really like showing ads for some reason. I think Google, whose main business is ads, will try to shove them in more peoples' faces, and claim that YouTube Premium will be "reduced ads" and then there will be YouTube Premium+ that has no ads, for a nominal fee, of course.