If they can't survive without reduced ads on subscriptions, or the price of subscriptions without ads becomes unviable for users, then they're stuck between a rock and a hard place.

I honestly wouldn't mind a subscription that reduces ads to the point of being _non-obnoxious_, but I'm in an odd position because I pay for YouTube Premium, which doesn't have ads, and costs a lot more money to distribute (video, text, and images vs text & images), but I grew up in the newspaper age which were chock full of ads free or subscription.