Piracy: ꜱᴀɪʟ ᴛʜᴇ ʜɪɢʜ ꜱᴇᴀꜱ

UBlock Origin is the name of the extension. My autocorrect messed it up ^^

https://filterlists.com/ - list of auto-updating filters, makes it very easy to add one. Make sure to use one with a good rating.

Yeah, do it. uBlock is great in terms of performance so you will feel how much faster browsing is after uninstalling the other add-ons. You can also block known scams or websites known by pirates to be unsafe. It can also block cookie popups (but I don't care about cookies might be better at this).

I also suggest Redirector, which lets you can set up custom redirects such as

Pattern name:  YT Shorts in normal player
Example URL:   https://www.youtube.com/shorts/ExmplVid-ID → https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ExmplVid-ID
Match pattern: https://www.youtube.com/shorts/*
Redirect to:   https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=$1

It is very powerful and can also replace multiple extensions. For example, it can percent-decode URLs, which enables me to prefix a URL with ar[space] in the address bar and redirect me to the archived version of that site. Just add https://web.aarchive.org/web/*/%s as a bookmark with keyword ar. (This trick is useful for making custom "search engines", which would often require yet another extension.) However, this trick is not enough alone because it goes to https://web.aarchive.org/web/*/example.com%2Fpage and Archive.org needs a decoded URL. So notice that I used the nonsense address web.aarchive.org which Redirector will detect and correct using this rule:

Pattern name:  archive percent-decoder
Example URL:   https://web.aarchive.org/web/*/example.com%2Fpage → https://web.archive.org/web/*/example.com/page
Regex pattern: https\:\/\/web\.aarchive\.org\/web\/\*\/(.*)
Redirect to:   https://web.archive.org/web/*/$1
Process match: URL Decode

Worst case of this solution is you might have to wait before watching your video. It wouldn't be unreasonable for google to refuse to send you the video until $ad_duration has elapsed.

Still beats watching ads though. I could queue up a bunch in a "watch later" playlist and have a program get them all ready for me.

AdNauseam is a browser extension that uses the same idea to obfuscate tracking. I never used it myself, but it seems like a good alternative to blocking ads.