Here’s the thing: how much YouTube content creators are really affected by ad blockers varies widely, and that’s due to several factors such as what region their main viewership is in, their subject matter, and how many viewers of each creator fit the demographic that might use ad blockers. YouTube is the only entity that would have the real data on the real impact to content creators due to ad blockers, and it’s believed that the reason they don’t share that data is so that they can inflate the numbers in order to claim greater losses than they actually suffer— and while that may very well be a strong motivation, I believe the primary motivation to be to hide the wide variation in levels of compensation between their top content creators. If the ad-blocking impact data became public, it would also reveal the wide disparities in how much YouTube compensates different tiers of content creators and would make public deals with top creators that have, until now, remained private.

This so why it’s always discussed in vague terms and as some existential threat— which is is, for them.