But ad blockers are happy to edit videos to remove sponsorship segments, so they'd also be happy to remove his self promotion. Ad blockers don't care about the exact form of ads, right? They just want to get rid of all of them leaving the content.
I know, but what I mean is that he must obviously inform people about his shop in some way, and so ad blockers can just remove those references. With modern AI they could theoretically even re-render his videos on the fly to write out any indication he's selling anything.
The point here is either you're OK with ad blockers in which case, you accept all your work is charitable and unmonetizable (because you can't even advertise what you're selling directly), or you have to accept ads in any form.
On his YouTube channel, he mostly cares about the bigger picture of right to repair rather than talking about its shop. I'm also quite sure he doesn't see his videos as a source of revenue. But saying "it's ok to remove ads from videos" doesn't imply saying "all the work I do is for free, including repairs". Those are just two different things. In discussing ad blockers you're also talking about how they could potentially work in the future, but there's no indication that what you talk about will happen. If it will happen that someone starts using AI to deeply modify a video, content crearors can re-evaluate their stance on the topic, as it would present a very different scenario than the current one.
I would also add that the real world isn't just black or white, one could totally be fine with a certain kind of ads and not with others, as long as is able to provide an argument for it.
