AFAICT I have not used youtube-dl to view videos that I couldn't watch on the site (except perhaps incidentally) - but I don't like executing random code on my computer and youtube web is in my view actively user-hostile and last I tried it had serious performance problems.

I had a feeling I was using youtube-dl to avoid ads (not blocks), but after some retrospective, I don't think I would have seen ads on most videos I watched from youtube and I think most were freely available videos, often embedded on author's pages - except people have an understandable habit of hosting them on youtube.

To conclude, I would disagree that we are all using youtube-dl as complained.