It's at least 'profiteering' off of the current state of YouTube, where anyone that uses an ad-blocking mechanism (desktop or mobile) is effectively being subsidized by the premium subscribers and mobile users without adblock.

profiteering is earning. what are the devs of vanced earning?

I mean the users using any ad blocking mechanism, including (re)vanced or simply ublock origin. YouTube isn't free for Google to host.

that is not same as profiteering. leeching maybe but "profiteering" is what brave does with replacing google ads with their own so that they show their ads and earn instead of google. that is not what anyone with ad block is doing..

nothing in life is free. everyone knows that. you and me know that. we use adblock regardless of that knowledge. how is this argument used against vanced now since we have accepted the necessity for ublock orign?

Also, it’s not like youtube isn’t popular exactly due to the freely generated content on it, not in spite of their hosting costs.

If they're not distributing the patched application, I don't see why this is any worse than using an unauthorized YouTube client.

They were distributing it.

Agreed, I was talking about Vanced, my comment wasn't clear. Revanced is a bit more gray, but still very dark.