Very plausible. I also haven’t recently been signing in when watching.

I noticed some thoughts in this thread estimating that this is being rolled out to users logging in for the time being.

People are going to throw a brick at me, but I’m using brave and have never seen this.

This is why I use Brave on iOS devices. It is the best option I found. Others mention Adguard home and pihole. They just don’t work as well at blocking ads.

The spyware link is not a credible resource. Read some of the other comments here and look at what that site says about Firefox.