A year ago or so I was listening to podcasts on YouTube while falling asleep. I didn't mind an occasional ad. Then they ramped up the ads like crap. Easily every 5 minutes or so (the funniest ones were the "Troubles falling asleep?" ads that jolted me awake). I stopped almost completely ever since. The sad thing is that I would gladly pay for the service, but I'm not going to pay a company that uses my data AND my money. Plus I have to use it with an account at google. No thanks. I have no hopes for an ethical competitor to arise, there's simply no market for it.
YouTube premium costs 10$ a month. Anyone living in first world (while posting on hacker news) countries and spend hours a week on youtube shouldn't be complaining about ads on youtube.
How about complaining on behalf of all the people who can't afford $10 a month, like teenagers, people in lesser developed countries, etc? You're happy for them to be spammed with toxic advertising while people who are better off get an opt-out?
I'm consistently shocked how many people haven't installed uBlock Origin (a plugin for Firefox and Chrome). It takes about 3 seconds and you never hear or see an ad again.
mps-youtube is an excellent workaround for this (though it's limited by a per-day API limit that applies to all users of the app AFAICT).
The best feature is that you can compile a playlist, through search, manual selection, etc., and save that locally to disk. Then play through the selection(s) as you like.
You aren't limited to playback through mps-youtube, as you can also use other tools -- mpv with its '--ytdl' flag will play YouTube (and many other sites') content, including from a saved playlist of URLs (see above).
There's a lot of good and useful content on YouTube. The platform itself increasingly gets in the way of that. I also don't want to be personally tracked or have my history recorded, so I (all but) never make use of the service whilst logged in. Given that I've ceased logging in to Google at all since the fall of G+, that's pretty much a certainty.
As others have mentioned, using podcast apps directly is another excellent option, and one I've been increasingly making use of.
