Different from the OP, but Youtube Premium now feels like "we will just make YouTube worse and worse to sell Premium".
Even with all of the pushing toward Premium they have done for me, the only values I even know are "you get the ad blocker experience without installing an ad blocker" and "we stop blocking picture-in-picture support".
I hate that ad blocking causes the channels I watch to not get financial support, but at this point I refuse to let Google be the middle-man and make money off of providing a purposely horrific experience.
What if they just stopped the free version entirely and became paid-only like Netflix, Disney+, etc.? There's no reason they have to offer a free tier at all. To the extent that the paid tier makes them more money, I understand why they'd push people onto it.
Ads are going to be the end of us all if you ask me. Completely perverse incentives. Make people feel bad so they CONSOOM? Dark stuff.