I’m getting strong traction to finally get around installing pihole.
You should, but it specifically doesn’t work for YouTube. PiHole works by blocking DNS requests to known ad servers. But YouTube hosts their own ads on the same servers that host the videos. So if your pihole blocks the ads, it also blocks the videos you’re trying to watch.
I haven’t seen youtube ads in years. uBlock and sponsorblock extension in Firefox on my laptop. Newpipe with sponsorblock on my phone.