So, is google going to start dropping some pages from searches if they don't carry advertising? And are they already?

Great question. If they haven't already been doing it, why not? after all, serving ads is their core business.

It stands to reason that if YouTube is now forcing channels to advertise, those channels would no longer have the option to 'turn off' advertising.

The fact that YouTube doesn't have an answer to Blender's ticket tells you all you need to know: This is /another/ Google snafu.

Google’s monthly Storm Of The Century, right on schedule.

Can vimeo provide what they need?

The real lesson here isn't forum shopping -- moving one's digital work to another singular place is repeating the error of the past: any singular forum invites censorship or an outcome that is indistinguishable from censorship.

The answer is to distribute one's digital work widely across multiple means including those that don't need JS. Don't push people to run needless JS via PeerTube (Blender's PeerTube page is useless with JS turned off which is actually a step down from what YouTube allowed for some videos).

Instead host copies of the work in many other places such as places that don't require JS like archive.org (no JS needed, easy downloading and embedding anywhere). And encourage people to distribute copies in ad-hoc informal networks without tracking or JS.