I've been having a repeated conversation lately, where somebody complains to me about YouTube and my internal response is "it doesn't have to be like that!" With a few browser extensions, you can reliably bypass many of the most common complaints about YouTube and enjoy your video time much better. I'll show you how.
The web browser is software that you own and control. Firefox, Chrome, and their various alternatives are mostly open source software that support powerful modifications in the form of browser extensions.
The web does not belong to the companies and brands that publish there. They put a website out there, you download it, and what happens from there is nobody else's business. If there's something you don't like about a website, like the font, visual layout, or a barrage of ads, you can use a browser extension to change the website so that it fits your needs and respects your space.
Let's apply this to YouTube, in the context of the complaints I hear most commonly.
Here's my list of extensions I use, and how each one contributes to a good experience:
DeArrow has a mission to "make titles accurate and reduce sensationalism. No more arrows, ridiculous faces, and no more clickbait." It replaces the gimmicky thumbnail preview images and the attention-baiting video titles with an actual representative still frame from the video and a crowd-sourced title, suggested by one of your fellow viewers. This makes it easier to tell whether you're interested in a video before you click and signal to the algorithm that you want to see more similar content.
From the same author as DeArrow, SponsorBlock seamlessly skips over segments of the video which contain a sponsored ad read. The video skips the minimal amount so that you don't miss any content. Optionally, you can also auto-skip animated intro segments, reminders to like and subscribe, and other categories of content that some viewers find low-value.
This doesn't analyze video in real-time to detect sponsored ad reads. It's based on data submitted by other users. So if you're watching a fresh upload, or you enjoy some niche creators, you might have the opportunity to submit timestamps for segments to be skipped for the benefit of other users.
Indispensable for browsing the web, uBlock Origin blocks advertisements on YouTube and many other websites. This saves you time and Internet bandwidth, reduces the browser's memory consumption, and protects your peace.
The Unhook extension gives you the option to remove YouTube features that you'd rather live without, such as related videos, YouTube Shorts, live chats, the suggested video wall, and many more. You can even remove YouTube comments entirely if you don't enjoy reading them. I personally hate those "end screen cards" which appear over the final seconds of the video and link you to more videos. It just encourages you to keep zombie-watching instead of moving on to something more valuable. Unhook made it easy to turn those off.
https://www.mrfdev.com/enhancer-for-youtube
This extension gives you the ability to fiddle with every part of the YouTube platform, such as choosing which codecs and frame rate you want to use, setting exact playback speed outside the bounds of what options YouTube usually offers, and much more. If there's some small thing about YouTube that bugs you and isn't covered by the other extensions, it's likely that this one can help you out with some futzing.
On Android, Google Chrome doesn't support extensions. But Firefox does! Switch to mobile Firefox and enjoy superior browsing, including all the extensions above.
Your video player should respect you. That's not too much to ask for. It's a shame that YouTube (and parent company Google) are so disrespectful, but at least for the time being we still live in an era where we control our own web browsers and can modify disrespectful websites to force them to behave.
Take the opportunity. A better world is, in this specific instance, only a few button clicks away.