That's because every company's strategy aiming to monopolize is to:

1. Make a product that's genuinely better than what's on the market for some role. Sometimes by undercutting competition at a loss, sometimes by making things very convenient, etc.
2. Once you're big enough, make sure as you keep growing that new competition can't pop up to challenge you. Kick the ladder down behind you, and make sure to start greasing the palms of lawmakers so they can't challenge you in step 3.
3. Once you're so big that you've monopolized the market and can't be challenged no matter what you do (both because of ladder-kicking and because everyone uses you by default), do what you've been wanting to this whole time and go from "boiling frog"-pace enshittification to "welp, this sucks, but now I have nowhere else to go" enshittification.

It's why people who say "Oh, well I wouldn't mind it if X had a monopoly because they're way better than those other companies" are so painfully misguided.

I was using adblockers well before Google existed since the internet was already full of that shit by the time they came around. Actually was kind of a selling point for them back in the day; no clutter, no ads, simple layout, great results.

My, how the mighty have fallen...

Google lost the high ground when AI generated Joe Rogan was blatantly selling crypto scams on YouTube. Advertisers don't even care about the quality of the advertisements, every single industry that has used advertisement as its primary foundation always becomes a group of crooks living in a cataclysmic house of cards.

Pay only for products or for services. If no payment option exists to receive that product or service - and that product or service alone with no extra baggage/strings attached - then you must assume you're being scammed.

I won't watch YouTube without an adblocker. Used to pay for premium for years through VPN in turkey, was like $4/ month for family plan. But now they region lock payment methods. So back to ublock origin and Firefox in addition to a pihole setup that blocks hundreds of thousands of ad sites. Fuck advertisements.

What was great about those days was that often, the ads were actually relevant to the page I was on and led me to more quality content.

I ran an adsense site, and I got great results hosting and running ads.

Now ads are fire-hose shit that has zero relevance to me, my life, or what I'm searching.

You don't have to use YouTube