I have begun to see that YT is being hostile to adblocker users - and this worries me. I assume YT is already probing the clients to see which are circumveting the ads.

I had an (let's say unconventional) idea at one point: an add-on which only purpose is to show the YT ads in the background which uBO blocked. All of the blocked ads would be played (eventually) - except that the user can just ignore this happening in background and wouldn't be actually seeing the ads. I.e. the browser would just move playing the ads into a background container not visible to the user.