Exactly

You've got the right idea for sponcer block. All of the nord VPN ads within a video, intos to songs that aren't part of the music video, off topic content, self promotion, subscribe please pleas, and whatever else can all be blocked.

Does brave browser do sponcer block in YouTube as well?

For phone wide ad blocking you can use Adaway or a few others that work similarly. They use the VPN slot to route all traffic through the app which compares sites to a block list and prevents the pings to the DNS server for ads or other things you want to block.

Or you can use a DNS such as NextDNS. This does a similar thing but instead of the block lists being on your phone they're on the DNS server. NextDNS cal block a ton of telemetry and other things as well.

The advantage of Adaway and other similar blockers is they save a good amount of data. But they use a little extra battery. In my experience the extra battery used for the app is more than offset by the battery drain of the pings to ad servers.

I use NextDNS on my home router to block things network wide at home. And I use Adaway on my phone.

I also use Firefox with uBlock Origin and privacy badger.

A fair amount of the everyday apps I use also come from F-Droid.

In all honesty, I know that many people don't sideload apps. But what I don't know is how they manage like that. There's just sooooo many ads. YouTube has minute long ads, ffs sometimes in the middle of the video I think. Games have tons of ads. Just general apps will have ads. Reddit's official app, tons of ads.... Why do people choose that life instead of sideloading better apps and ad blockers???

(rhetorical question, not directed at you)

Yeah, but then you're stuck with an apple phone and no ability to sideload apps