I believe that YouTube (and its suzerains Google and Alphabet) will lose this war.

Advertisers and platforms employing advertisement fall for the tragedy of the commons, where the common resource is the collective attention of the users. If you don’t abuse that attention - by adding yet another ad space, and making your ads slightly more obnoxious and data-invasive - you’re simply outcompeted and get no money.

This has reached such a point that even your granny is pissed. She might not know what’s adsense, but she knows that she clicked a knitting video and got a muppet screaming “ACME CONDOMS~” in its place.

And for some, the reaction against being bossed around on what you should buy is so guttural that they’ll go out of their way to learn to code, create and maintain ad blockers, and circumvent any shitty anti-ad blocker crap that you might throw at them. For free.

Every time that YT makes its ads a bit more obnoxious, YT gives a small edge to any competitor that may arise saying “we don’t force ads down your throat”. Eventually that edge will be enough to compensate for the network effect. Perhaps not for youtubers who rely on adsense, but certainly for hobbyists (“I make videos for fun”) and people with different sources of income (like selling books/shirts/whatever).

Messing with Chrome to prevent ad blockers won’t help Youtube/Google/Alphabet Inc. much either, unless you’re literally unable to switch browsers. Tech illiterate might not know how to install a new browser, but they know how to ask for help to “get rid of the ads”.