I think there is a median point between this dichotomy where YouTube comes up with ways to collect revenue that don't depend on maintaining an adversarial relationship with their users.
If the ads make you feel like they're specifically there to make you hate them enough to pay, that's basically playing highwayman. You can't blame people for thinking that's distasteful. They could have less intrusive systems for advertising or just make it subscription only, patron/donation based like Wikipedia, or some hybrid of multiple models.
That's inherently subjective though. About the only way for a paid product to not make me feel that way would be to keep showing me ads after I pay up, which is not what we're after. On the other hand, people have claimed on HackerNews before that they just plain don't mind ads. Where do you draw the line that says that they're specifically there to make you pay up? It's intellectually dishonest to both complain about ads and complain when a company offers a reasonable alternative to those ads.
> They could have less intrusive systems for advertising or just make it subscription only, patron/donation based like Wikipedia, or some hybrid of multiple models.
They have that. Subscription only makes discoverability (YouTube's primary strength) far more difficult. AFAIK YouTube does offer paid channel subscriptions, but for whatever reason Patreon seems to have captured that market far better.