Unlock origin + Firefox! The harassment stops. I'd rather donate to the unlock team monthly instead of paying google for a solution to a problem they created.
FYI, SponsorBlock isn't just for skipping sponsored segments. SB gives you granular control over the sorts of sections you can skip, and it only auto-skips sponsors by default. However:
There are several categories of section, including intro animation/intermission ("an interval without actual content"), preview (i.e. where the information already exists later in the video), sponsor (a segment made in return for payment from a third party), unpaid/self-promotion (e.g. "buy my merch"), interaction reminder (e.g. "remember to like and subscribe"), and endcards/credits. (There's also "filler tangent/jokes", but I haven't tried this one.)
For each of these categories, you can choose to disable altogether, show in the seek bar, prompt to manually skip, or auto skip.
So even if you would never want to skip a sponsored segment in your life, the extension still saves a ton of time if you have no/limited interest in watching even just one of the above-listed categories.
Absolutely! And what I ran down is just the extent of the features I personally interact with; there are a fair few more, including one that aims to combat clickbait by changing clickbaity titles.
One helpful thing I found is that it can skip "non music sections", ie those cringey silent scenes they put in YouTube videos. If that'd existed a couple of years ago, I probably wouldn't have switched to Spotify. I mainly switched because I was sick of random 10 second pauses for dramatic effect in the middle of songs, often right before the chorus
Actually YouTube kinda built in the feature lol. It detects sections of the video most people skip and gives you a button to skip it as well. All right inside the YouTube app.
AdAway (F-Droid) will do the same but on-device (so it works everywhere), and if you're rooted it'll do it without the VPN by directly updating the hosts file.