uBlock Origin on Firefox has continued to work for me. It doesn’t skip the ad, but it does prevent any ad audio from playing so it’s just dead air til it’s done. It does have the occasional hiccup where it doesn’t resume the music after the ad is done, but it’s rare enough not to bother me.
I do also have a PiHole but I don’t think that’s contributing, as it behaves no different away from my home network.
Subpar selection? I can count on the fingers of one hand the songs I have found on other sources but not Spotify.
I don’t even pay for Spotify, but I still use it to find new music because it’s hands down the best way to do so. I create a playlist of all the new songs I want and then purchase them all when Bandcamp Friday rolls around. I’m getting all the benefits of Spotify without paying them a cent (my ad blocker even works on it too), plus being as supportive as possible to the artists themselves.
This sounds exactly like the lies anti-drug proponents tell to try scare people off drugs. Did you know there was a boy who died after injecting just one marijuana?