I’ve been getting very close to ditching YouTube. This change showed up a few weeks ago for me and pushed me a bit further.
If they succeed in inserting ads into the video stream I’ll bail alltogether. I can fit a subscription to Brilliant, Dropout, and several creator Patreons into the cost of a YouTube Red subscription, and I won’t have to deal with these attention-optimizing UI changes.
I reccomend this series
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KYxuJ9ujAYo