For each 10 ft wall youtube builds uBlock will eventually find a 11 ft ladder.

Actually looking a bit more at how the xhr filtering is implemented, uBO seems to do it not at the webRequest level but instead by shimming the javascript fetch() method itself. So maybe this approach would still work in a MV3 world, I don't know what restrictions are imposed on content scripts.

How does the actual code look like?

No. People that care will simply stop using Chrome.

I already have firefox installed on all my machines slowly transitioning over. Chromes new UI updates are really pushing me over to firefox faster. Now when I set up nee computers for friends I install firefox for them, when they ask me why not chrome I tell them chrome is old news and not to be trusted which they happily accept and use firefox. Slowly the tide is turning.

Whenever I'm helping a friend with their service, the price of my intervention is then switching over to Firefox, haha. The tide will turn

I stopped using Chrome and YouTube... If a service is getting close to unusable for you without an ad blocker, you should just ditch it.

I've been Chrome-less for several years and I am "Google-free" with regards to email, phone, services, etc.

However, going without any Youtube is difficult. There's a lot of interesting content out there. Do you use an alternative way to access it, or go without it entirely?

If I'm really motivated I either just download the content (yt-dlp) or use duckduckgo search interface. It's actually not bad.

I started hosting Viewtube app hoping I'll catch up, but while it's quite amazing (surprisingly light and emulates subscriptions behavior for you), I had issues with it... So as for now I remain mostly cut off.

There is a lot of great dev and ops related content (conferences) that I come back for, but not for subscriptions I used to love.