> if they are demarcated by the creator - and most videos with in-video ads have that

I'm almost positive that SmartTube is using the SponsorBlock database, which does not depend on creator-submitted demarcation, but rather on user-generated/crowd-sourced segment tagging. https://sponsor.ajay.app/

This sounds amazing. I personally resorted to FreshRSS and an extension that allows me to spoof feeds from YouTube and socials as if they were RSS. It’s not perfect, but it is a chronological plain-text (apart from hyperlinks) list of content that I feel materially healthier for having switched to. My past experiences with alternative frontend interfaces for YouTube is that they last a few months, then Google tweaks their API just enough to break them all for a few weeks.

I also pay for YT Premium, and I have maintained a family subscription since they initially offered one. I wish they would just provide Premium users with options for turning off shorts, comments (per-channel ideally, but across the board would be fine too), games, and everything else I don’t care to ever engage with.

I also run a self-hosted AdGuard service for DNS-level adblocking, but it sounds like Google’s getting around that as well. Next stop will be DNS with SSL and a proxy. I am a little concerned that I am having to establish what must appear from the outside to be a very sketchy anonymizing infrastructure, and it’s all just to use the web the way I always have, whilst avoiding the increasingly intrusive and anxiety-inducing tracking and advertising.