The way I solved this was to leave my regular browser setup alone, make a new Firefox profile just for YouTube, install ONLY ublock origin, and create a shortcut to that profile on my desktop.
Now I only use that profile for YouTube. I haven’t seen one ad since this thing started.
I don’t understand the concern though. I always assumed my votes, comments, or even PMs here were readable by at least the admins of the instance I’m a member of. The fact that votes and comments are public doesn’t seem to matter from a security or privacy standpoint.