this post was submitted on 02 Dec 2023
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I would argue it's not "against all odds". The add-on devs probably know better how YouTube is working than the bunch of underpaid, outsourced script writers that are tasked to implement the stuff. The latter also have to make sure that it doesn't break for legitimate viewers (oh, sorry, I meant "impressions").
The YouTube team at Google isn't all outsourced and generally Google uses it's top talent for the money making side of the business
The people in the ads side are some of the best around. The problem is: they don't necessarily care about ad blockers.
My laptop came pre installed with Firefox and ublock origin. Google Chrome had ad blocking in it as well. The devs in the company don't like ads any more than anyone else... Also ads are a major security risk, and using ad blocking is just good opsec.
Your perception of Google software engineers is way off. They're more often than not some of the best software engineers in the industry because their hiring bar is very high, and they get paid like it. YouTube is an astounding complex problem to solve with thousands of moving parts and non-trivial problems. It's honestly astounding people are able to build sites that complex, and that they're not only common but extremely reliable.
The issue is there are even more extremely intelligent software engineers outside of Google than in, and many of them spend some of their free time working on FOSS projects including ad-blockers. It's also almost always harder to be red team (attacker, or the ad-blockers devs) as opposed to blue team (defensive, or the people trying to stop them).