I understand where the "everyone using adblockers, makes it worse for those who don't" argument comes from, and it generally makes sense. But I also have my suspicions that the expectations of infinite growth in publicly traded companies would probably have made it happen, even if nobody used adblockers. That being said, as someone who is giving YouTube money every month to not have ads, there's a reasonable argument that I'm enabling their bad behavior.

Fully agree on the 4k uploads thing though, and it also seems to be hurting the bitrate of lower resolutions. Up until around 2021 I primarily watched and preferred 480p when watching on tablets and sometimes even lower on my phone, for me it was a good balance of lower data usage and acceptable image quality. They've cut the bitrate so much at the low end though now, that sometimes even on a small phone screen I have to watch at 720p just to keep things from looking like they were recorded off a video conference from the early 2010s. Maybe 720p just is the new 480p and it's using a similar amount of bandwidth, but it feels like they're chasing the "bigger number better" crowd, rather than just defaulting to a reasonable resolution, with a high enough bitrate that most people won't feel the need to adjust it.

To be fair, they aren't exactly profiting from the current strategy.