I started paying for YT Premium years ago after I got fed up with the ads. I value the content and I think the service is actually really good so why not pay for using it? Premium users also generate more income for creators so that's also a huge upside since I want the creators to thrive as well and keep on making good content on the platform. I think the basic ad-free subscription is only 4,99€ and Premium including YT Music is 9,99€ here in Finland so not bad at all compared to for example Netflix.

It's one thing to replace Reddit since it's basically just serving text content but replacing YouTube is not easy at all. Videos take huge amounts of space, bandwidth costs arms and legs after you gain any user base and then you also would have to be attractive to the content creators somehow. I think YT at it's current state is worth the subscription cost and given how the platform works it's also IMO completely reasonable to either force users to watch the ads or pay for ad-free subscription.