They want to sell their Premium subscription. They want you to compare 5 seconds of nothing versus "0" seconds of nothing. That being said, I think uBlock Origin with up-to-date filter lists completely eliminated this delay for me.
At work, we can't log into personal accounts. And my job isn't going to buy YouTube premium. So now any video tutorials on YouTube is getting impossible to watch.
This has now triggered a bunch of lazy developers into action in my entire company. Even our internal newsletters are explaining how to use adblock.
They can try selling me their Premium subscription again when they start suggesting more than one or two videos (if that) on their homepage that actually interest me.
Not that I'll ever pay for it, anyway. But get me something that I'll actually click on to get served ads before trying to sell me something to get rid of them.
I still worry that google is going to declare ad blockers against their TOS and shut down my gdrive and 20 year old gmail. I'm trying to move away from alphabet shit but it's not so easy with such a long history. To that end I haven't even once used yt except not logged in on a FF private window with ublock since they started pulling this shit.
I recently created another google account for youtube just in case. Was a huge pain to transfer over all my subscriptions but worth it for not having to worry.
Changing mail providers isn't easy when you use their domain endings as you'll probably have to update a bunch of accounts to use a new mail address. For the future, use email providers that allow to use your own domain(s), switching providers is a lot easier then. You can export mails from Gmail with ease though, as long as they provide IMAP you can simply sync your complete mailbox and you could even upload all of it to your new email provider.
And Google Drive...simply transfer all your files to somewhere else and done.