Vertical integration works really well to control quality of your platform if you have the resources to make it happen. You _could_ make the argument that System76 is too small of a company to financially make this work, but the payoff is a better product.
I would expect IPC between GUI applications to go the way of iced's Subscriptions + Commands, sending and receiving messages from a central bus or other peripheral components running as daemons.
I use the Vinegar extension for Safari which replaces the YouTube player for a simple HTML5 <video> tag and consequently removes the ads. Don't know if there's alternatives for other browsers, but worth looking into if this is all that's keeping you there.