Youtube is wasting ressources, it’s a fight they can’t win

nah, if they embed the ad into the video stream (they were testing this for some users!), the only adblocking option will be to blank out the screen and wait through the ad (or download the video in advance and edit the ad out automatically), both of which would make it a lot more annoying to adblock than currently.

No, you just need to skip the ad. Sponsorblock has been working for years now, solving pretty much the same problem

nope, the ad time varies unlike a sponsor segment, and also youtube would not let you skip through an ad while streaming it, whereas sponsors you can, hence the download and edit out with LLM or whatever algorithm works best

It can be detected

yes, but if youtube only serves you the real video chunks after your client plays through the ad chunks (all in the same media stream to the client), theres gonna be some waiting involved, not like adblocking today where it is instant.