The LDS church has been doing pretty much this same thing for a very long time. It’s why you see wards and church property adjacent to almost every public high school in the north western states. They have also ruled politics in their more populous areas.

Very plausible. I also haven’t recently been signing in when watching.

I noticed some thoughts in this thread estimating that this is being rolled out to users logging in for the time being.

People are going to throw a brick at me, but I’m using brave and have never seen this.

Same. A bit of flack around some of the communities here if you use brave though.

Pi-hole doesn’t stop YouTube ads in my experience. I use it. But I layer other things on it like ublock or Brave (please don’t hate for Brave, it just works across mobile and desktop for me).

Edit: pihole is dns blocking and ublock or things like it are element blocking in the browser. They are both good at what they do. Just different about how they do it.

This is why I use Brave on iOS devices. It is the best option I found. Others mention Adguard home and pihole. They just don’t work as well at blocking ads.

The spyware link is not a credible resource. Read some of the other comments here and look at what that site says about Firefox.