Opinions on the article Google has declared a war on YouTube users: watch ads or pay

This is exactly the problem of you who block ads or at least reject those annoying consents to the use of cookies (mmh, if you reject it, the cookie list will annoy you all the more).

You are against yourself, you are against the websites you visit, and their operators have nothing to do with you (do you work for free?), on the contrary, they have more work to do with you.

You yourself mention that the ads that are displayed are irrelevant to you and you never click. You’re actually to blame for that, because you block ads or have 3rd party identifiers banned.

It is the case that the publishers will send you the ad anyway, even if you reject it, otherwise they will not be financed and will disappear.
But they will just bomb (more and cheaper) instead of showing you something that might interest you, because they have nothing else left.
The only thing left is to either block the content, or use an antiadblock solution that proxies the whole thing, often breaks it and slows it down a lot (you’ll still get the ad), or force you to register somehow.

Instead of at least supporting the websites you visit by allowing them to give you relevant advertising that won’t kill you, you keep trying to harm them. Oh no.