Because everybody else is rather unhelpful (JusT USe AdBlOck, DOn’t USE yoUToUBe), try this it you can’t get adblockers to work:

For specific ads, look at the ad information below the video. There should be three vertical dots you can click, which will open a menu. From there you can report inappropriate ads or tell Youtube you’re not interested in those.

Customising ad topics and brands on your Google account can help get broader strokes of ad topics out of your ads. You can customise (up to a certain extent) what kind of ads Google will show you. You’ll still get ads based on the video subject, but it can help to remove specific entries.

If you’re on Chrome, you can try going to the new ad settings in your browser and see if there are specific topics you can disable from there. Google’s latest change to the ad ecosystem was making the interest tracking happen locally. There’s a good chance you have it disabled, though.

Adblock does still work for Youtube, as long as you don’t stack ad blockers like they’re layers on a sandwich. Blocking ads has become more involved, though, now only a few ad blockers will work and they won’t work in Chrome in a few months. Don’t do the crap reddit tells you (adding custom rules, changing settings willy-nilly), just run uBlock Origin at default settings.

On mobile, Revanced works pretty well. It takes some effort to set up right, but once you’ve got it running you won’t need to bother looking after it for a few months. I’m not sure if there’s an iOS alternative.