All you are doing is laying down cover fire to support further advances by an abusive monopolist. YouTube's financials don't HAVE to add up. Google owns advertising for the entire Internet! The entirety of YT could be a loss leader just to suppress the growth of streaming video businesses outside of their control, and the Google monopoly would carry on.
Here are behaviors that are fairly unique to monopolies: raising prices while degrading their product. Many businesses try to do these, but monopolies, who have no significant competition, are more likely to succeed. Sure enough this monopolistic behavior is what Google has just exhibited: by banning people who use ad blockers, they have either degraded their product, or raised the price (from $0 to the cost of YouTube Premium for those users), depending on how you look at it.
They can do this because they are a monopoly.
Your subscription money doesn't go to the producers anyway, or only little of it, so the $14/mo is for a large part Google's profit.
But more to the point, yes, a browser is a client, but without the economic incentive of either ads or direct monetization from users, many sites, YouTube included, would simply not work. Storage and bandwith costs money. Unless we decided to somehow fund all of this through some sort of additional tax through the ISPs or governments, ads or subscriptions are a necessary evil.