I agree. They do operate in bad faith. And not only do they throw ads into every possible crevice but the advertisers themselves may be bad faith actors. It's easy for a local radio station to decide not to run ads for a shady local business but YouTube doesn't really seem to have anything in place to vet advertisers or a robust system to report ads for malfeasance.
I'm interested in the framing of advertising as a threat rather than just an annoyance. I think even ads for something like laundry soap being spammed over and over for hours on end can be harmful even without being directly malicious. As someone who has been blocking ads for 10 years, every time I am on someone else's device the amount of garbage that just gets thrown into your face by default is just atrocious.
I guess it's harder to do this after 13 years of default "free" content. It's easier for someone like Spotify to do that because there has always been the option to pay for premium.
I remember in the earlier days of Spotify there were a lot of ways to get half priced service just by finding xyz code or paying $5 for a code on eBay that got you a year of half priced Spotify. I don't know where those came from or how those existed but it was definitely what finally convinced me to subscribe.
(I've since cancelled in favor of buying CDs again but I realize I'm the oddball in that scenario)