Obviously, you know the answer. Yes, I take your point about paying for something that provides value, and generally would agree if not for the corrupt political system that allows a corporation like Google to have the near complete hedgemony that YouTube enjoys. As it stands, there are basically 4 choices right now:

1. Watch ads and let them spy on you
2. Pay them while they still spy on you with a guaranteed real identity
3. Use smaller platforms that have few creators contributing content, many of which are for-profit and may one day go public and turn into something resembling Google today
4. Use ad blockers / alternative clients to have your cake and eat it too.

Since Google also wants to have their cake and eat it too by charging you while still tracking you, and at the same time, mistreating the users and creators responsible for their success, it follows that the members of a left-leaning and tech-savvy community like Lemmy would overwhelmingly choose option 4 while also doing option 3 whenever possible.

Part of the reason why I self-host is to avoid being tracked under my real identity that is required for payment. No way I’m paying a big corpo with a surveillance capitalist business model to spy on me to avoid their ads. Sounds akin to paying the mafia for protection.

I’m sitting here reading this as my spouse watches the stock YouTube client with ads on a TV that also has SmartTubeNext installed. Evidently, the ads are preferable over a less refined UX when you’re less neurodivergent and don’t jolt out of your seat whenever a stupid, loud ad comes on. As much as I’d like to say DRM will kill YouTube, objectively speaking, it probably won’t. What it may do instead is kill YouTube clients with better accessibility for neurodivergent folks like SmartTubeNext.

Must be nice to not worry about injuries bringing financial ruin like in the USA.

It’s a jack of all trades for sure, but it also has features paid software doesn’t, like its 2d animation system with Grease Pencil. There are also paid extensions on BlenderMarket and the like that make it more competitive with more specialized features in other software. Extensions are GPL licensed, so I’m happy to pay for them as opposed to the rest of the toxic CG ecosystem where everything is subscription-only.

Edit:

I wish all paid software were GPL. It’s nice buying something and being able to look at and change the code, write code that calls their code, or even snag a bit of it for to use in your own thing.