pretty questionable for a YouTuber to put a plug for their sponsor as the frontmost text when many of us use sponsorblock to actively avoid seeing such content

Extremely common 🤷‍♂️… also, whether we use sponsorblock or not is completely irrelevant to the contents of a video description IMO.

Probably better for you to avoid youtube creators who rely on sponsors’ income to completely avoid any form of advertising. Even the sponsorblock timestamps don’t block off-hand sponsor mentions within a video