No, you misunderstand. You get seconds assigned to your token. It doesn’t matter where in the video you use those seconds.
So if you watch an ad you get say 60 secs of video until you need to watch an ad again. You can watch 30 secs, then skip 2 minutes ahead and watch another 30 secs, then you get an ad. In reality the times would be larger, but to illustrate a point.
In the current setup YT uses, if you watch an ad, watch 2 secs of video, then skip ahead of the next adbreak, you get more ads.
And yes as stated, a separate client can get around this. But as also stated there will always be ways around it, it’s just a matter of making it harder. If it’s beyond what a simple browser plugin can do, it’s good enough. And YT has been banning 3rd party clients anyways, so that makes it even harder.
Most of the bots on Lemmy have been well meaning, but ultimately annoying.
The issue is there isn’t really a lot of traffic on Lemmy. And from the people that are here a lot of them are lurkers, just consuming, maybe upvoting once in a while, but that’s it. This leads bots that reply to a lot of comments/posts to become a large part of the traffic and thus the experience for the users. There isn’t enough for the bots to get lost in the noise. This also leads to the user experiencing the feeling of only interacting with bots, instead of other people. Most people commenting are looking for people interaction and get annoyed when they think they have such an interaction only for it to be a bot.
Lemmy is also very focused of an audience at the moment, which leads to bots not really being necessary. People here are usually very tech savvy and know how to do most of the things. A bot that explains how to do things people already know how to do comes across as unneeded.