also don't use brave or vanilla Firefox

https://lemmy.blahaj.zone/post/40391590

Blåhaj Lemmy - Choose Your Interface

Or I can pay for YouTube premium because I watch a tremendous amount of content on YouTube and it also supports all the creators I watch at least a little bit, so I don’t have to subscribe to 25 patreons

Agreed. It’s actually the only streaming service I subscribe to because I get so much use out of it and at least some of that money goes to actual creators. Plus, YouTube Music has an insane library of obscure shit.

Granted, I still use a few of those plugins, to improve the experience further.

Yeah I had the Google play subscription for years before it got grandfathered into the yt premium package. Its kept the same price over time so I’ve just never turned it off.
The nice thing about Patreon or donations is that even a one-time $1 donation (alternatively a one-month Patreon subscription at self-set price) is worth more than years of anything paid out by YouTube itself.