why isn't there an option for "soft adblock" for subscribed yt channels?

Instructions unclear, fingers stuck in eyes.

Yes. This is 100% true for youtube and really any proprietary service with paid tiers. The greed is obvious and premium is only a little better than the alternative because creators are still being screwed over but slightly less. I only partially blame it on a large amount of people getting used to free content. But until there's something clearly better, I'd rather do this at least since it's still a net positive. In the meantime, I'll participate in FOSS communities and try to contribute to alternatives so that it doesn't stay this way.

I partially agree with you, but hosting and serving video is expensive on that scale. The cost of that has to be covered somehow, and for those who don't pay directly ads are generally the only way currently available. And companies don't want their ads associated with some kinds of content, which makes perfect sense. Would you like it if your name was associated with pornographic depictions of carebears?

Video is a massive amount of data just compared to images, not to mention plain text.

cf Cory Doctorow's theory of Enshittification

No, I still keep ublock enabled and still use revanced on my phone (RYD, sponsorblock, qol improvements). None of these actually prevent youtube from tracking your view, since the view counter still goes up and the video appears in your watch history.

I'm a small-time YouTuber who relies on the ad money to an extent.

My take is that if you like what I do, can't afford a donation, but don't want to sit through ads, first of all I'm still happy you're there and enjoying the content. Even the view itself is valuable in a small way, algorithm-wise.

Secondly though there are plenty of other things you can do that help bring in more viewers who might be able and willing to support monetarily. Sharing videos, commenting and liking on new videos to give them that initial bump, recommending the channel when it's relevant to a conversation. In my case, taking a free pattern I've made available for you to follow along with a tutorial video, and making sure to give credit when you make the project. Etc etc.

It genuinely all helps and although my YT friends are all small-time like me, there's not a single one of us that doesn't appreciate our regular viewers regardless of whether they actually earn us money.

I'd probably just mute the ad and go to a different tab or look away from the screen. I don't mean that to sound flippant, but it feels like the easiest solution.

If it's about monetarily supporting creators, the answer is "they can't". To monetarily support someone you either need to give them money or do something that gives them money (which, in this case, is watching ads).

In terms of supporting in other ways, someone with a large enough reach might be able to post links to videos to their communities and those other people may watch the videos (and ads), or by subscribing to/ringing the bell for a content creator's channel and being very on top of liking and commenting as soon as something goes up so that the Mystical YouTube Algorithm™️ pushes the video to more people.

Respectfully, if you can't afford something, then you shouldn't consume it. Ads are a nice way for creators to get paid for the time they put into creating the thing without requiring their customers to actually fork out money. If you don't want to fork out money AND you don't want to watch ads, then you need to just not consume that media. Anything else is not fair to the content creator.