Remember when Google introduced text-only ads to replace flashing animated banners and pop-up ads popular at the time? I didn’t mind those and I didn’t need an adblocker.
Nowadays YouTube is the primary reason I have to use an adblocker. It is literally unusable with all the ads.
They didn’t block the entire element, but they blocked banners and in-page ads somehow. You’d just see a broken image icon where the ad would normally be and it wouldn’t be a clickable link.
The popup banners were the real things you’re killing. Some sites would have popups that had their own popups, so you open the wrong page (without an ad blocker) and it’s like a recursive loop of popups constantly popping up, consuming all resources on the PC until it blue screened.