Youtube's biggest threat ever died in the cradle because they foolishly thought users would volunteer money to them.
No one with capital and capability looks at youtube, looks at youtube's audience, and says "Yeah, 30-40% ad-blocking and 4.5% paying for premium, these are the people I want to build services for!".
Those ad-blocked viewers are important, which is why YT doesn't actually crack down on them.
Those are the people who will happily go to an alternative product. And while that product might start as a pirate YouTube, the one that nabs 30% of YT's traffic can certainly make a pivot to legit. If you're a content creator whose audience is mostly in that group, you're likely to start posting content directly on the competitor's site.
I'm guessing OP had their account banned for using a tool like yt-dl too aggressively. Then again, doing that does give a warning.
Youtube does crack down on them, all the time. Why do you think they are "important"? What are they contributing, and to whom? How does Google benefit?
They half-ass crack down on them. Not even that, it's dime-assed crackdown at best. You get that little "experiencing issues?" note that the bottom of the screen (which goes away after a few seconds), and an occasional 3-5s delay before video starts.
I explained exactly why I think they are important in that entire paragraph. And the evidence I'm right is the fact that YouTube could trivially prevent ad-blockers tomorrow, but they don't. They've tried it and quickly rolled back the changes. Presumably they lost a lot more audience than expected.
Though anytime I do land on actual YouTube, and not an invidious instance to watch a video, and am confronted how utterly crap the YouTube frontend and their video player is, I gotta wonder, whether the crackdown is half-assed, or simply the maximum of what they are capable of developing.
Youtube won the war on ad blocking when most views moved to TV and mobile. While I've seen some people have hacked clients to run on TV platforms, the average person just either watches the ads or pays for youtube premium. The friction for ad blocking has gone up to the point youtube makes enough money to not care about the rest.
In tech/engineering/video game categories, ad-blocking is still around 40% of viewers. Basically things that people who still use desktops/laptops are into.
Youtube's biggest threat ever died in the cradle because they foolishly thought users would volunteer money to them.
No one with capital and capability looks at youtube, looks at youtube's audience, and says "Yeah, 30-40% ad-blocking and 4.5% paying for premium, these are the people I want to build services for!".