The idea was that youtube/google was rolling in so much money that the super users using ublock/utube-dl/invidious was so small Google won't waste their time bending over to pick up this penny on the floor.

apparrantly the money lost seems to be big enough for them to care (or they run out of actual features to code so tossing this problem to engineering to fix).

Yeah, it would probably help if it's not posted across sites with millions of users then :/

(Or perhaps explicitly request YouTube Premium account?)

Either way, that is some incredibly naive logic. The so-called open source software "community" desperately needs some lessons on how capitalism works.

everything in my post was capatalistic in nature.

google's investment to stop ublock/invidious/etc > money lost = no blocking google's investment to stop ublock/invidious/etc < money lost = blocking

The community assumed the first one, google calculated the second option so are proceeding with it.

What % of YT viewers do you think use Invidious?

I think the surprise is that % would be enough to care. But apparently it is.

Google is in the middle of a scandal of faking advertising numbers, this is just a game of shifting the blame to somebody else.

It's never been about ad blockers and the alternative frontends, they are covering up their own failures.