It's questionable for how long that will be the case. The web frontends break often as YT changes, sometimes to intentionally prevent their usage. Piped has been showing the message "Sign in to confirm that you're not a bot" for months now[1].
I've seen similar issues with yt-dlp, though they've been temporary so far, and the team is quicker to work around them. But it's only a matter of time until YT decides this is enough of a nuisance for them and blocks these completely. It would be trivial to do so, and workarounds could be very annoying to impossible.
I pay creators directly all the time (for all media, not just videos), so this confusingly common sentiment is irrelevent to me.
With that out of the way; I would gleefully see YouTube disappear before I paid them a cent. Throwing money at something until all of your real competition goes out of business is exactly the kind of behaviour you would expect of the type of company that then takes advantage of their new position to screw people over.
If YouTube really minded freeloaders, they would put the whole video catalog behind a paywall.
But, they won't do it, because the 99 % (source: my behind) of people who don't pay for YouTube give it extreme social relevance. If they turned the site into an exclusive, paid club, another tech giant (Amazon? ByteDance?) would roll out a competitor in a week and would take the "biggest free video catalog" spot instead of Google, and they would do it happily. The biggest obstacle to doing that and trying to compete right now, network effects, would be instantly gone.
As such, I believe Google's appetite for jacking up the subscribers' price is much larger than their willingness to gamble the site's social capital. YouTube is massive in terms of its cultural impact over the last two decades and I am not saying Google isn't stupid enough to risk this legacy if they were really hurting financially, but I can't imagine the current circumstances with the current percentage of ad-blocking and the current ratio of subscribers to non-subscribers or the loss Google incurs running YouTube (which I am not even sure there is any anymore) are even in the same numerical system as the values it would take for Google to consider doing anything real with the so called "freeloaders".
That's fine, just know that you are not as ethical as
paxys and I. Both of us use Microsoft Edge with all tracking/ad/popup blocking turned off because we believe in supporting every website and ad network that so graciously provided us content to enjoy.
For me it is the only way to enjoy YT because regular videos except streams use to freeze for me in browser from time to time recently even with enough number of frames cached.
