chapotraphouse

Oh yeah, it would piss me the hell off too. If it really does end up breaking uBlock and there is no other work around, I will be one of the ones to simply just not ever watch youtube videos, regrettably.

Since it does seem limited to just some people right now and you are one of the unlucky ones, I'd suggest just using youtube frontends (like Invidious or Piped). They also seem to still be blocking ads just fine and have a bunch of other benefits. If youtube ends up implementing this new ad-forcing bullshit for everyone, I'd expect the frontends won't be immune from it either, but for now, I can't recommend these enough. When I was testing uBlock earlier of course I was using youtube directly, but generally speaking, I don't use youtube directly at all anymore and will only watch youtube videos with an Invidious or Piped instance. If you're not already aware, it's as simple as replacing the youtube-dot-com part of the url in your browser with the url of a frontend instance (that's what hexreplybot does for us!) That's going to be easier and less time consuming than using a downloader for every video you want to watch and certainly easier (and less costly) than a VPN. Youtube hates this of course (one of the reasons I love it) and so instances will sometimes get blocked or rate-limited, but it's always just temporary and all you have to do is use a different instance. Today piped.yt was working well for me, so whatever video you're trying to watch, just replace youtube.com with piped.yt, leaving the rest of the url the same. If you have issues with that, try inv.tux.pizza (which is an Invidious instance).

And since you mentioned using an extension, another thing I'd recommend if you want it automated so everytime you click on any youtube link you see the video via one of the frontends, get the extension LibRedirect. It's an unfortunate name for an otherwise pretty great extension. It works for a bunch of other websites too if you want it to.