They’re getting longer, more frequent and are generally very intrusive.
So the hack is to use a VPN and set it to ‘Albania’. I have a NordVPN subscription and the chrome plug-in, so it’s very easy to activate on the fly, and it seems to work based on the fact that YouTube doesn’t serve up ads to Albania 
I’m using Tubular, which is a NewPipe branch. Not only I don’t have any YouTube ads, but for the popular videos I don’t have any sponsor blocks, intros, outros etc etc. I watch only meaningful content. It’s much better than when you only eliminate YouTube ads. I can also download video or audio in different formats, bitrate, resolution etc. And the software is free and open source.
I simply use Brave (or Firefox or Chrome with ublock origin.) Bye bye these bastard advertisements.
AdBlockPlus for me. When yt moans at me then I turned ABP off for a few days and suffer the ads then turn it back on again until yt moans again.
Yeah, I switched to Brave quite recently, as Firefox, which I’ve used for years, was starting to disallow ad-blockers from working for youtube. But yeah, it just works.
For desktop there is an awesome YT client w/o ads:
There is, of course, the obvious solution: pay for youTube subscription (the official way to remove ads).
Not so dumb as it sounds, as eg it includes youtube music premium, which can save money spent on spotify subscription.
I personally wouldn’t mind paying, instead of trusting my devices with spurious “free hacks” which break from one day to the next
I used to tolerate ads as I’m not frequent YT user, but I agree they cranked up them to a level when you just can’t consume YT without silencing them.
I genuinely cannot understand how anyone can tolerate them, short or long, quiet or loud. If I’m ever on a platform where I see adverts I will immediately take any possible steps to block them, and if that fails I will simply not use that platform any more. Nothing on youtube, let alone other channels, is that important anyway.
Same when watching TV - if there’s a program on (any non-BBC channel) right now that I want to watch I will always wait until it’s far enough into it that I can skip the adverts. Yes, that’s a relatively recent luxury with streaming TV, but sometimes on the replay channels advert breaks can be five minutes long, or even more. I count the clicks on the +30 second button to skip them so I notice these things.
It’s an art-form to calculate the click-throughs in our house. Top prize goes to the person with the remote that manages to get to the end of the “…sponsored by XYZ” without running into the next segment of the programme. 
I probably need to get out more…
Same here. I can’t tolerate them at all. I either, block or refresh until they are gone. The embedded adverts, I skip using ctrl-arrow to skip to the next segment or skip forward until the sponsor section is finished.
Another trick is to use something like yt-dlp to download the video directly to your computer and watch it there. This has the advantage of being able to watch offline too.
Ah well that’s fine tuning very specific to the program. When I’m watching the F1 on channel 4 there’s not only the ‘sponsored by’ bit but also a five-second or so intro jingle to each segment, so +30 seconds 9 times and then -10 twice, but it’s difficult to get it exactly right, sometimes the breaks are a minute shorter or longer at different stages of the program.
I have noticed recently on the Swisscom TV box that if I press pause/play briefly to bring up the slider I can actually see the advert sections marked on the line, so it’s possible to be much more precise.
Never heard of that one, other, not yt-specific, downloaders are available. Currently using Cococut since I switched from Firefox to Brave.
As part of learning German I watch F1 on SRF. There is only 1 or 2 commercial breaks during a race, max. No more ads unless there’s a red flag.
I could watch it live in French, but despite being pretty fluent I just find the style so different, with the similar-sounding commentators often interrupting each other for one thing, and the focus they put on French drivers (even on TSR) it’s just not the same, and the attention level required is just too much like hard work.
So I wait to watch it later in the evening. I guess I got into the habit over the years, making sure to record it even before the replay concept, rather than excluding my wife from the living room for three or four hours over a race weekend 
Our son has that down to a fine art. Eight clicks on the fire stick remote for some channels and seven for others. He is the master at it.
Second the recommendation for Brave. Haven’t seen a YouTube ad in years on my mobile.
For smart TVs and other “devices” with YouTube app built in - yeah, just don’t use those… Only use devices where you can install your own software
We have custom Youtube without ads on smart TV.
Smart TVs are too dumb to my taste. I use it as a big display only. MiniPC capable of running Linux for multimedia can be bought below 300 chf, and you’ve got endless options like using torrents in background
An Android TV box will cost you a fraction of that. I use them in my guest apartments, typically they last three or four Android versions before needing replacement (usually it’s the Swisscom app that stops working) so three of four years. A quick Amazon search shows that they’re even cheaper than the last time I replaced a couple, Android 14 ones from just over 20 francs. Best use a little wireless keyboard controller, which IME last forever, also dirt cheap.
https://www.amazon.fr/-/en/s?k=android+tv+control+mini+keyboard+wireless&rh=p_n_free_shipping_eligible%3A20934939031&s=price-asc-rank&dc&ds=v1%3APqjUj5v3%2BFGpbEXWpxaN3VSbtCl%2F8vKlfsnxLFdoV44