Or, and stick with me here, you want to support the creators. Because the creators get most of the money from premium subscriptions.
As per the creators, who see how much they get for premium views and ad views (they already know how much they’re getting from everyone else).
I already brought this up above. The creators won't get money unless you sign into Youtube Premium and watch videos using that account, and that is a straightforwardly, almost universally worse experience than just using NewPipe and uBlock Origin anonymously.
Youtube Premium is more valuable to creators than ads, but part of the reason for that is because ads pay basically nothing to creators. The payout structure for Youtube Premium is weird and not really healthy for an ecosystem (since it works off of view percentages which discourages more professional projects in favor of spam). It's still not a lot of money, and it's ultimately a kind of bad system for funding creators. If you do want to support creators (and you should), donate to them directly when possible.
It doesn't make sense to purposefully make your viewing experience worse so that creators can get a fraction of that subscription revenue. You're supporting Youtube with Premium; but you'll help actual creators much more by using Patreon, Twitch subscriptions/donations, buying merchandise, or just donating directly if they support it.
Even if Youtube Premium was giving a comparable payout to direct support (which it's not), most creators on Youtube don't want to be reliant on Youtube for their revenue. Direct donations allow them to have more agency over the stuff they make, and subscriptions/purchases outside of Youtube allow them to stress out less about the fact that Google controls their entire livelihood.
I still disagree with your conclusion, since it’s a self imposed restriction that results in creators not being compensated. That’s on you, not YouTube.
I make a point to donate to creators I watch. I'm not compensating Youtube (although I did pay for Premium for quite a while), but I am compensating creators.
And yeah, that's easy for me rationalize, because I'm honestly not particularly happy with Youtube as it exists today, I think it has close to a monopoly on indie video online, and I think it would be good for other services to pop up around it. If it was possible for me to avoid Youtube entirely, I would, but... see the monopoly bit again. I don't think anyone saying "just walk away from Youtube" is making a serious suggestion.
But even given the above situation, if I thought paying for Youtube Premium would encourage Google in a positive direction, I would do it. I did do it. I just don't believe it will anymore. My experience with Youtube Premium was that it got weirder and weirder the longer I used it, and I didn't see any evidence it was helping Youtube as a platform.
If I can get out of that relationship while still supporting creators, I'm happy to do so.
When the "how to replace the thermal cutout in a Kenmore dryer" video helped me (and did so with a minimum of fluff), I bought the parts from the company that posted the video. (A whole set of spares, because why not? Pay shipping once, put 'em on the shelf, and have a zero-minute response time next time something fails.)
When I realize I'm 3 videos deep into someone's channel and I'm wishing the clock wasn't staring at me so judgmentally, I head for their Patreon straight away. Or their merch store. Or whatever lets me tuck some money directly from my pocket into theirs.
The next step is to find hosting elsewhere. I should make another attempt with PeerTube or something, or see if someone's building a video frontend for IPFS or whatever. And then start pestering my favorite creators into double-posting their content. Yes it's more work, and they won't do it unless there's a base of users who likewise feel good about paying creators. But I can be the start of that.
I haven't looked around recently to see if there's managed hosting somewhere that I can link to my own domain, but I'd be very tempted to sign up for a service like that. I like the idea of Peertube quite a bit, particularly around how it manages bandwidth -- I think that's very clever. I just realized that I don't take an active enough IT role in my infrastructure to handle setting it up myself and to trust myself to keep it patched and secure.
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But yeah, aside from hosting direct donations/purchases are the way to go. Sometimes that can be very difficult to do. Patreon has a lot of problems but has honestly been huge for enabling easier payments. We're in desperate need of better private micropayment systems for the web. Cryptocurrency was a disaster, and not everyone is always on sites like Patreon, which I get because it's work to maintain a presence on those sites.
I paid for Youtube Premium for a pretty long while, and the only reason to pay for it is because you want to support Youtube. The official app for Android was awful the last time I used it, I've never been tempted to go back to it from NewPipe. You'd download videos and sometimes Youtube would just decide, "no, that's not downloaded anymore." It was way more battery hungry than NewPipe. I had less control over mobile data. It was glitchier and I couldn't turn off distracting features like comments or recommendations.
There was also this weird problem where signing in on both desktop and mobile would occasionally mess with playback and Google would tell me that I needed to only have a video on one device at a time. NewPipe doesn't have that problem.
And there's the privacy angle: Youtube Premium necessarily requires you to be logged in and to have your videos tracked, that's part of how the funds get distributed to creators.
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So for a while I just gave Youtube money and literally didn't use the service at all, because adblocking was better in every way. But I gave them money because I wanted to pay for the service. And eventually I realized I couldn't figure out what I was paying for. I wasn't paying for content, because I wasn't logged in, so the people I was watching weren't getting subscription revenue from me. I was giving Google money, but it wasn't clear to me that giving them money was proving anything or making Youtube better or encouraging them to do anything -- whenever I looked at Youtube Premium it seemed like the service was actively getting worse and that a lot of the annoyances I was supposedly paying to avoid were creeping back into the service.
And I eventually realized that Youtube does provide Google value even if I'm not paying for it. It allows them to effectively hold a near-monopoly on independent video hosting online. And so I stopped paying for it because the only reason to pay for it was for an idealistic reason, and I realized that I'm actually be fine with Youtube failing and more independent sites popping up, and I don't actually want to encourage Youtube and if anything I'm happy for it to be a loss-leader for Google. For the creators themselves, direct donations turn out to be a lot more valuable, and I try to do that now when I can.
But every once and a while it comes up as an example of "people won't pay for anything" and like... I just don't think that's true. The reality is you are paying for less than nothing when you use Youtube Premium. You are paying for a worse experience than you would get from an adblocker, and in some cases you're paying for even more annoyance when Google starts getting snippy about how you use your accounts between computers. Idealism is one thing, but is it actually surprising to anyone that people don't feel motivated to donate money to Google?
Because that's what Youtube Premium is. There is no reason to use it unless you want to donate money to Google. The price isn't even the main issue -- even if Youtube Premium was free, I wouldn't use it. It's a worse experience than 3rd-party clients and adblockers. It exists so that Google can try to tie it into existing services or make a case to the public that they need ads, but this is not a serious effort by a company that actually wants to offer a real service for money.