Working for free for a large corporation is just sad. What’s even weirder is that this person acknowledges that it is basically a job, but doesn’t mind not getting paid for it. I think most people that spend ridiculous amounts of time working for a big corporation for free don’t have the understanding that it is basically a job.
Paying to remove ads is part of the ad business model. Upset your customer enough until they give you money to make it stop. Once you pay to remove the ads you have rewarded them for implementing ads which lets them know that implementing ads was a great way at making money.
So YouTube premium is not another model. It is the same model. Another model is paying for a service that never had ads at all such as NebulaTV or CuriosityStream.
Somehow? Paying to remove ads is rewarding ads thus causing more ads in the world. It’s not mysterious at all.
There are plenty of ways to not make it an all or nothing service, but that is at least the most straight forward. You could potentially give some of it away and then have to pay for the rest. Or have some stuff for free and more premium content is paid for. Or perhaps based on bandwidth with video quality / resolution.
Anything that is not ads is going to be an improvement.