Yes sacrifice your livelihood so that someone else can implement the feature anyway.
Yes, that’s called having a backbone, aligning your actions with your own moral code.
This is the same logic as ‘well if I had quit my executioner job, someone else would have done it, therefore I am a morally blameless and non hypocritical executioner who is against the death penalty.’
Just use an ad blocker.
Obviously this is the easy solution for yourself personally. Costs you nothing, benefits yourself, allows the systemic bad practice to continue.
The actually accurate analogue would be to contribute toward actually creating or maintaining a free and widely usable adblocker, an alternate platform, to do something that helps other people overcome the problem.
With a job or other source of income, or lifestyle that propogates/depends on less overall harm.
Sacrificing your livelihood is much closer to killing people than to adding some extra ads on youtube
Yep, the classic dilemma of software devs with YouTube on their resume:
Keep working for YouTube, or never work at any other software company or non profit organization or any other employer that wants software devs, or any other kind of job, and just starve to death.
Its truly a shame the software dev’s decisions are so binary.