Oh, so it’s shit in the way I originally thought, then.
And also shit in the second way I thought, since adblock is a symptom of how terrible they’ve made the experience on their platform and if they want less people to use it they should make that experience more reasonable.
Given the shit big companies have got up to in the past and continue to get up to, as exposed in past and ongoing antitrust cases, that conspiracy theory you mention really isn’t all that unrealistic. Yeah, it’s not what happened in this case and it isn’t the simplest solution, but it’s absolutely a believable thing for YouTube to do, though I think they would have hidden it better if they had.