YouTube lived off venture capital, search sponsorships, and content hosting. Venture capital is long dried up. Search sponsorships are just advertisements but clogging your searches. Content hosting isn’t really needed anymore since every large media company has their own streaming platform. Lot has changed since 2006.
I’m in the same boat. USA here and only the initial start menu tiles had junk but removed them long ago. Next time I go on my computer I’ll look closer. Maybe my brain just auto filters ads out at this point.