I think it definitely depends on the channel. Most of the videos I watch only have one or two ads.

What I really hate are the very long ads that you have to skip manually. Sometimes we play something on the TV while we're cooking so we're not by the remote to skip them, and they can be really egregious, like 15 minute ads.

I had an hour long ad show up a couple of weeks ago. It was basically a film on some health/food product, but I had never seen something so over the top like that before.

This needs to die in a fire. Like the parent comment said, I will sometimes allow ads to play through if I'm away from the remote expecting the actual content to continue after a 30 second interruption. When you suddenly have the "channel" changed on you from something like this it needs to stop. Hell, I can't even listen to a full album in YT without a "are you still here" after 4 or 5 tracks. That "are you still watching" should come up multiple times in the ad by itself. Maybe the popup should be "Are you still watching? Why?"

The iOS app has become unusable for me because of this. Not only are there too many ads but they are so poorly targeted to me that I have to seriously question the capabilities of Google's army of engineers...

That could just be an ad inventory thing. If YT doesn't have a targeted/discrete audience large enough within a campaign window to fill out impressions then they likely widen the net to complete the run.

I think they explicitly choose to run the same ad over and over again for 40-60 times to the same user to force that user to subscribe to Youtube Premium.

(Someone's evil A/B experiment resulted in such a high conversion rate they couldn't stop themselves.)

I think thats certainly in their repertoire too. In fact, they're probably experimenting with a number of degrading user experiences to see what performs best

Just play political ads from whatever candidate over and over. That'll get somebody to make the ads go away.

I literally converted today because of this. Damn you Dr Squatch soap company.

If people would pay for content we might have less ads...

I wish that were the case. I'm regularly served just as many NYTimes ads as before I became a subscriber.

Wait till you see what TV is like these days. Ads everywhere.