It's possible that particular user, despite not wanting the shorts, will keep paying for YouTube for longer because they enjoy shorts. It's also possible that they genuinely don't like them and are less likely to keep paying because of them. People are different. What keeps some customers engaged can turn off others.

Yes, as you say, maybe there isn't a big demand to disable shorts completely.

I think you're basically right, but the comment I replied to was saying they'll somehow get more of that specific user's money. While the shorts may improve retention in aggregate, this particular paying customer doesn't want them.

They don't make more money from showing you shorts once you've paid to remove the ads.

The default reason some feature doesn't exist is simply because no one bothered to make it. Maybe they don't think there's a big demand from their users to disable shorts completely.

As I understand it, you don't want to posit the existence of a new particle, or new property of particles (e.g. particles have mass, charge, and some consciousness property), or a new field or anything outside of the standard model of physics. In other words, there is nothing special about the particles themselves that causes consciousness; they're just bits of matter that can push and pull on each other. And when you arrange bits of matter that push and pull on each other in just the right way, it somehow creates consciousness.

If that's all there is, it seems likely you could create consciousness out of marbles connected by springs. If protons and electrons don't have any special consciousness-related property other than pushing and pulling, we'd just have to recreate the arrangement of matter and the forces to get consciousness.

There is no way to make the leap from particles and forces to consciousness that seems intuitively right. No arrangement of dumb matter, whether marbles or protons, should be conscious.

On a somewhat related note: forces are rules that dictate how things move. At some level, position and movement is the only thing we can measure. When we measure something like voltage or charge, our measurement techniques actually rely on observing the movement of particles.

Consciousness doesn't seem like it's just movement. But if there were some other property of our universe that didn't cause movement, we would have no way to measure it. It would have no observable effect on matter. Which would make epiphenomenal consciousness seemingly impossible to prove or disprove even if it were some basic property of physics.