It hasn’t really mattered enough for them to spend any engineering time on it before. Zero interest rates are over, though, and money actually kind of means something now. This is just the first move in a chain of many.
A warning for anyone relying on stuff like adblockers for YouTube - it’s not that hard for Google to figure out that we’re doing it, simply query for which users have zero ad impressions. Google also has a certain tendency to permaban Google accounts in violation of their policies and then ignoring all appeals. If you rely on Google accounts for email, photos and the like, this might be the time to plan contingencies.
Personally I’ve started using Piped instead. The lack of recommendations is a bit of a bummer, but in all honesty it was kind of like the switch from Reddit to Lemmy - just had to wean myself off the digital sugar pills.