Seriously launched the app (by accident today) and what is this? They're trying to play the victim from the big bad ad blockers saying all they're doing is trying to show an ad at the beginning of video, and then I see all of this crap.
This was after a non-skippable ad at the beginning followed by a totally real "survey" that it wanted me to fill out, one interruption so far in the content, and now three ads on the screen. That's 45% of the screen dedicated to ads. Freaking ridiculous. "But please turn off your ad blocker".
If you're on a rooted Android, ReVanced is a great option. It patches the YT app to behave like Premium, removes a lot of annoyances and integrates SponsorBlock and the Dislike API.
Ah, so that's probably only needed when you use the rename app feature? Because it complained about microG missing after launching the YT app with the default patch selection so I had to use the mount installation method, which requires root (I think).
It's been a while before I had to reinstall. I think the MicroG .APK is maybe is installed separately from ReVanced?? Sorry I can't remember. But yeah you haven't ever needed root to use it.