I actually don't think that Premium is the goal here—I think the goal is to get as much user data as possible regardless of whether or not they're paying customers. I have a very good reason for believing this.
See, I have Premium, and I have for like four years. I am exactly what you would assume they want all users of the platform to be. I pay monthly for access to a handful of features that I find useful, and they don't serve me ads at all.
I still make sure to block all tracking cookies whenever possible, because I'm not using the Internet strictly for YouTube, and I'm not in the business of allowing myself to be tracked all across the web when I can avoid it.
A couple weeks ago, YouTube stopped working for me entirely. After having it running in the background more or less all day while I was drawing, it suddenly stopped loading anything but the skeleton.css stylesheet, which looks like this:
Nothing here is clickable, it's literally just a bunch of static graphical elements. I couldn't access my account, settings, anything. I was completely locked out of the service.
I did some digging, and found out that this is one of the things that happens when the anti-adblock protocol catches up to uBlock Origin and shuts down people who refuse to remove that protection. But...I have Premium. The platform doesn't serve me ads at all. There is absolutely no reason for them to block my access to the platform.
Still, I tried turning uBlock Origin off, and it didn't change anything. Weird.
Eventually I got ahold of someone in tech support, and I was told to do the following:
Stop using Firefox, reinstall Chrome, and only use that to access YouTube. This is because that is apparently the only browser that is "truly compatible" with the platform, and if I'm using another one then they can't promise that it will work. (This is a lie, and after a half hour of back and forth with the agent she admitted it, linking me to a page showing all compatible browsers, among which Firefox is prominently listed.)
Completely uninstall any adblockers I have on any browser that I use, because having them at all could cause YouTube to block my access. I was not told to whitelist YouTube, I was told to completely uninstall the extensions on any and all browsers, and then try to access the platform again. This kind of explains the fact that turning UBO off didn't work—the implication here is that my account was flagged as having an adblocker active, even on an alternative browser, and the account itself would be blocked until they were removed.
I was told that unless I completed both of these steps—and these were the first troubleshooting steps offered to me, as a note—then we wouldn't be able to move forward with the tech support process. Literally, if I did not do these things, the agent would not even attempt to provide any more help. I basically told her that was unacceptable, and we went back and forth for a while longer. She told me that adblockers are not a form of Internet security, so removing mine would not leave me vulnerable to anything, and told me to install Chrome an additional four times. I told her that I was not going to install Chrome. She told me that we couldn't move forward unless I carried out every step she instructed me to do in order to fix the problem.
I told her that I was sorry if I seemed nasty, but it seemed like she had no intentions of actually offering any help and was just following a script telling her to make me install Chrome—and that she needed a better script. Her response was "I'm sorry I don't have better news for you," and that ended the conversation.
Again, one more reminder, I have Premium. I am not being served ads at all. That didn't matter, I was still instructed to uninstall those extensions outright, and refused assistance or access to a platform I pay for unless I agreed to do so.
Want to know how I got the platform to load again?
I manually turned off JUST the tracking cookie blocker.
They don't care about users' money, they care about users' data. They care about knowing what you are doing and where you're doing it, even when that information isn't being used to serve ads.
Anyway I cleared my cache/cookies, updated the extension, logged out, restarted Firefox, manually turned the tracking blocker back on, and logged back in. It's worked fine since then.
