I you use the external player, and mpv in particular with yt-dlp installed, then you'll have an alternative still using freetube as frontend to navigate YT.

I do prefer ytcui with yt-dlp backend, which is native, low on resources and I really like ncurses, but that's up to anyone.

That said, yt-dlp also gets IP blocked every once in a while, and also find itself non working at all depending on G. moves...