It’s not that it’s a hardship to press right a few times, it’s more that I’m trying to understand, academically, how to make a “respectful” skipping tool. Because I believe both that in-content ads are the most user respecting ads and deserve better engagement/treatment than “universally skip”, but also that users are not morally obligated to consume ads even for ad-sponsored content (is’t the advertiser’s, and only the advertiser’s, problem if users aren’t interested).

Sounds like the requirements would be: 1) it plays every new sponsorship pitch once, which you can still manually skip, and 2) it maybe asks you whether you want to skip on a per-instance level?