Or...

1. Quit paying Google for your abuse.

2. Use Firefox with Ublock Origin and sponsorblock

3. On Mobile, use Newpipe instead of the substandard YouTube app. No ads and you can play in the background.

But in reality, this is just furthering of Enshittification of Google's services. And if you're a paying sucker, they'll know you will pay more. So they can extract more.

The better answer is to start pivoting to Peertube for videos. But there's no advert dollars and is noncommercial. So it gets content delisted from YT. But this is a societal collective action problem.

But I want to pay.

Creators want food on their table, too, and I want them to be able to keep their jobs.

Donate to creators directly. Ideally, creators would run their own sites and folks would use RSS and other federated aggregators for discovery.

Sounds good in theory, but in practice this has never taken off due to barrier of entry to even set up your own youtube for your own videos. Excluding reach as well

YouTube can either have my money this way, or they can have nothing. It's still more money than they would have made in ads from the individuals viewing YouTube normally. And that's assuming no adblock.