I find it funny that a company as big as Google is loosing to little ol uBlock

Some arms races aren't what they appear to be: https://blog.codinghorror.com/revisiting-the-black-sunday-hack/

I switched over to piped.video and no ads. Just moved my subscriptions over. Not sure how long it will last but so far it's good

If that doesn't work, get the youtube enhancer extension. Turn off it's built in adblock. You'll have a bunch of buttons on the bottom of the video, one of which is remove ads, which becomes skip ads when an ad plays. You will still get ads, but you'll be able to instantly skip them all without setting off their adblock detector. (Ps, to get the bar in fullscreen, set it to bottom of window)

They are probably hitting people in waves, in an effort to make sure this isn't a surge, then a massive protest like the Unity situation.

But once google realizes they'll have to burn serious money and make their product worse on the global stage to fix the problem, they'll quit just like Microsoft, AOL, and Netscape.

But I think this campaign is just there to loosen the people who installed an ad-block, but have no idea what an ad-block is.

Which will be different from the people who know about "alternate methods," and will easily slip the google net unnoticed.

Updating uBlock and filters has a bigger Impact than choice of browser. You could be situated in one of the data clusters that implement new detection methods first, so the filter lists are not updated yet when they hit you with a changed detection script.

Also, if you use Enhancer for YT, disable the built-in ad blocking there. That feature triggers the pop-up as well.