There’s no need at all to rely on Chrome: If Google wanted to, they could enable DRM for all videos on Youtube today. Almost every desktop and mobile browser supports it.

They’d lose a couple of legacy client apps, but much less traffic than they would if they were to make it Chrome-only.

And this is what would happen. The only reason why it is not happening - many users would go and watch tiktok instead or FB videos would get a chance.

I don't see the reason to support the company, which dreams to make internet worse.

They could always exempt Youtube Shorts (which are competing with TikTok/Instagram reels etc.) from DRM and only apply it to longer-form content. Shorts don't get ads anyway in my experience (but I almost never use them).

shorts and CC licensed videos

Twitch "permanently" won by injecting ads directly on the feed, right now best you can do is sneak swap the small resolution version that stay on the side until they also removed this.

You can also VPN to a country that they don't serve ads to.

Actually the modern vaft script can completely bypass ads and has seen minimal changes for well over a year. Twitch gave up because most people, even the tech savvy ones, don't know about the solutions anymore.

https://github.com/pixeltris/TwitchAdSolutions

Yup. Webbundles and the other thingie.

Then use Firefox and/or non chromium based browsers.

Don't play the game. It's not a new game. Remember when Linux was "evil commie software"?

I like Firefox, but isn't Firefox funded by Google?

In the sense that Google pays for search engine placement, yes. They also pay Apple for the same thing - I'd hesitate to say that gives them much influence over either Firefox or Safari.