They've been doing this for close to 20 years. Ever since shortly after google bought them.

If they know I’m blocking their ads, why wouldn’t they just block the video altogether? That’s what they currently do.

If it’s already blocked, slowing it down to “blocked… but slower” seems rather pointless?

They are probably trying to find that spot where it's just slightly more annoying to block ads than leave them unblocked.

If they give you what you want, but harass you enough, you may just stop using an ad blocker to watch the video and might just forget to turn it back once you are done.

If you had to unlock your bathroom door to enter or exit, you will either put forth effort to correct the problem or you will take the lazy route and just prop the door open.

It's a tarpit. If they simply displayed a blocked "no vids for u" message, you'd get outraged, go complain online, look for workarounds, and eventually find a bypass. If everything still works but poorly, you get annoyed, turn off your adblocker to troubleshoot, possibly blame the adblocker for being "buggy" and keep it off. Their help page solution implies they are hoping for just that. There is no "smoking gun" blocked message to go complain online about, even though it is indeed their servers that are degrading your connection on purpose in secret. Or maybe you give up and leave their ecosystem entirely, which is no big loss for them.

The proper solution is to develop an adblock that they cannot detect is blocking ads. This may require actually downloading the ad video in background, and then lying that the video has played.

Currently blocking ads consists of keeping uBlock Origin up to date. Not blocking ads generally means going to a different platform after a single ad roll.

I have no issues with pre-roll ads; it’s the interstitial ones that drive me away.

I’d be more likely to just assume delivery quality was going downhill and look for another streaming video hoster/provider. Why would someone link slow speeds to a plugin that filters out the stuff you don’t want?

So you don't find something else to do.

Google will never get a cent out of me, willingly.

If it gets annoying enough, and FreeTube stops working, I'll find something better to do with my time.

Stripping down to a skeleton of a software is standard troubleshooting procedure. Ever had a plugin crash and consume 100% cpu? I had. Only way to sense is that fans are spinning up and page is laggy, and then look in about:performance and there it is. No one would have ever suspected that the website you're visiting is deliberately introducing bugs in secret if it thinks you're adblocking.

Thanks uBO team I don't even know yt is trying anything

I have already started finding peertube replacement channels.

I have already started finding peertube replacement channels.

I'm trying very, VERY hard to pound the correct knowledge into my brain to be able to switch my freelance business services away from Google to something like Proton Unlimited.

Leaving the Google ecosystem will literally make me lose work, but man, this shit has gotta stop

Jokes on them, I already watch videos at 0.5x

I have an issue with pre-roll ads. Some of them are extremely long and can't be skipped

Thats a good one for 0.5x (soup store)
https://youtube.com/watch?v=fNcYtcVn-8k

it already happened, it takes few seconds to star the video, a popup comes upa nd says, "whats slowing your video down"

i have been blocking them fro 10+years with none other than UBO. only recently i added more adblockers, to block other stuff the ubo wouldnt.