Yes. This is 100% true for youtube and really any proprietary service with paid tiers. The greed is obvious and premium is only a little better than the alternative because creators are still being screwed over but slightly less. I only partially blame it on a large amount of people getting used to free content. But until there’s something clearly better, I’d rather do this at least since it’s still a net positive. In the meantime, I’ll participate in FOSS communities and try to contribute to alternatives so that it doesn’t stay this way.
No, I still keep ublock enabled and still use revanced on my phone (RYD, sponsorblock, qol improvements). None of these actually prevent youtube from tracking your view, since the view counter still goes up and the video appears in your watch history.