Where does the profit come from if someone who doesn’t deal with ads is forced to watch an ad?

The creator gets paid for people watching the ads, not for buying the product. For the most part the point of ads is to increase brand recognition which in turn increases sales. Ads work wether you think they do or not. It’s among the most studied economic fields. There’s a good reason companies spend a ton of money on advertising. More people seeing ads = more sales. I too like to tell myself a story about how I’m immune to ads but I know I’m not.

Data-invasive, targeted advertising is superfluous and needs to die.

I agree. The alternative is paying for the service eg. subscribtion based business model.

Targeted or not - I’m not going to watch ads. If it’s a bad service like Instagram I’m just going to stop using it but in the case of YouTube if they manage to make adblocking sufficiently difficult and inconvenient then I’m going to buy premium. I can’t blame them for wanting to get rid of freeriders. If I was them I would probably want to too. Blocking ads is like piracy; I participate in it but it cannot be morally justified. I’m effectively stealing.