I think they saw it was kinda backfiring. If they make it inconvenient enough instead of impossible, people might give up? Or they are just trying to be dicks to people using ad blockers?
But that does nothing unless they tell us they’re doing that.
If I just see the service getting slow, I’m not going to “Oh this is because of my adblocker, better turn it off to go fast” I’m going to think “Fuck YT is turning to shit, it cant even load a page. I’ll go watch Twitch or something”
I agree with you but not everyone has the same thought process as us. I've explained it to my entire family and I always end up "fixing it". My family doesn't care about alternatives because they dont like things to change.
"Why learn something new when the old way still works?"
My family's thought process on these things just doesn't make sense to me sometimes but it's the conclusion they get to.
Since they failed to kill yt-dl, and in the meantime people have built plenty of very easy to use solutions to completely bypass YouTube's page, they may have finally realized that a nag screen with "subscribe for HD streaming" might be more effective than pushing even more people away.