For context I'm in the US. The last time I used YouTube without an ad blocker, there were 2 ads back to back, and way too frequently. I tried watching on my PlayStation tonight, and not only are they more frequent, they've increased in quantity by 150%. It's also very common for the last ad to last 2 minutes to over an hour long. What the actual fuck, why would anyone watch YouTube without an ad blocker at this point? It's literally unwatchable
Edit: the amount of unsolicited advice in the comments is unreal. I don't get ads on my phone or on desktop, I'm very aware of how to block them. I simply won't watch YouTube on my PlayStation anymore. I'm not looking for suggestions, please stop with the recommendations.
Local AdBlock (UBlock Origin) should be fine for anything browser based. It's really only consoles and smart TVs, where you 'own' the hardware but have no control over the software.
If ads are served on a separate domain, then pihole blockers still work on consoles/smart TVs
But mostly all ad-supported video streaming services realized that if they serve ads from ads.example.com and content from content.example.com, then it's trivial to have an adfree experience by just blocking ads.example.com.
So, YouTube ads URLs are made to be indistinguishable from YouTube video URLs from just watching network traffic, or in Pluto tv the ads are directly embedded in the stream
I think it's even by accident, wasn't carefully engineered to block the DNS ad blockers, but just that, since the beginning, all YouTube ads are just links to videos on the advertiser account.
It's also a reason why sometimes you get an irritating 5 minute trap video as an ad: that channel is inflating their view counter on their music video by just paying YouTube for extra views