Picture this: you buy a car. You buy a new set of wheels/rims and a new radio system with Android and whatever. You also put some new carpets on the floor of the car. Now you need to take it for a simple routine maintenance and checkup at the car brand official shop. After a few hours you go back there to pick you car up and it has the stock wheels, stock radio, stock carpets and everything and you ask where the hell is your stuff and ALL of them on the shop look at you confused like if they never seen any different accessory on that car before other than the stock ones, or don’t know what you are talking about. All they know is that the car is now “according to spec”.
This is what it feels like after updating Windows with Linux in dual-boot on the same drive.
The problem is that the paid premium is NOT better than free with extensions. Piracy is a service problem, and the paid service is NOT better than the “pirated” one. Even if premium was completely free, if it didn’t allow extensions I would still use the ad version with extensions.
Revanced android apps also exist, and I won’t use them with premium accounts (no point) and they are the only way of having sponsorblock, return youtube dislike, manual HDR and many other small but very useful features.
I would gladly pay for the content if and when the youtube official apps and website had features similar to those extensions.