So this comment made me curious, so I did a little looking, and according to the authors LinkedIn, he went to college in 1990, therefore he was most likely born around 1972, which means he wouldn’t be a millennial. So it looks like you’re correct, in this case at least, it’s not a millennial thing.
To your point about watching YouTube with adblockers still helping Google due to viewership numbers. That’s exactly why after I stopped supporting blizzard (at first due to the blutzchung controversy, then everything else that happened) I immediately stopped playing hearthstone, yes, I was playing it free, I never spent any money on it, but I didn’t want to even indirectly help by giving them usage statistics, or by giving paying people even a little bit of a quicker matchmaking.