> The slight remorse I feel by not using official YT frontends is towards creators I enjoy watching

That's what I felt bad about. I didn't care if I was depriving Google of money, but I was watching a lot of videos of relatively small channels, and I was watching them with ad block, and I wasn't compensating them otherwise. In a bit of fairness (though not much) I was not making much money at the time.

I agree that advertising is bad for humanity. I hate ads. I don't like the idea that a corporation is weaponizing my psychology to sell me crap I don't need. For the most part I would rather pay for things, but of course I make a lot more money now than I did back in 2015.

I've said it before, but I think it bears repeating: people will pay for things if those things don't suck. I think it speaks to the shittiness of the platforms that people will only use stuff like Facebook and YouTube if they're "free".