Well, I’d say “you get a warning and need to click past it once” is probably the right set of guardrails there, which is to say “as robust as a little bit of tape”.

The real disincentives on Google services are downstream, where that impacts your placement to receive ads and monetize. I don’t know how much The Onion cares about that, I’m guessing Youtube ads aren’t a massive slice of their revenue pie, but for everybody else it’s a significant carrot and stick thing to keep access to that sweet, sweet midroll ad money.