While that may be the case, when by terms of service the “fee” you pay to consume YouTube content is adverts, by blocking those adverts you are not paying the “fee” therefore it kinda is piracy. The argument about adverts with malicious intent or ones that are specifically designed to be deceptive is a different argument, though relevent for why said piracy occurs.

YouTube is free to you because you watch adverts. Otherwise you pay for YouTube premium. By using ad-blockers you circumvent these agreements.

I wholly support ad-blocking for the record, literally used ad-blockers my entire life and have absolutely no qualms with usage.

Technically. Streaming something is still downloading it. It’s just a compressed and temporary version instead of saving it to a specific file to