It isn't like it's a niche secret that YouTube siphons people's privacy and sells their personal information. Creators being ignorant about that might have been a excuse a decade ago, but not now. I don't think we should be excusing content creators who collaborate with and benefit from the machinery of viewer-exploitative content distribution that is YouTube.

Edit: also, you're here in a privacy community defending the violation of privacy that you yourself originally described as dystopian. I'm not trying to be confrontational with you, here. I genuinely do not understand how you can think that content creators bear no responsibility for the dystopian situation you've encountered. Certainly they don't bear all the responsibility for what YouTube does, but they chose to support YouTube by uploading monetized content there.

I'm not saying they should be canceled for that, but appreciated for it? Let's not.

In fact I didn’t! Thanks for pointing that out. Though every version of freetube I have installed works just fine. Ranging from Arch, to Nix, to Android and more. I did have a period where the version from the Arch repository didn’t work and I had to install it from the latest source. I thought that resolved itself eventually while I still daily drove Arch, but maybe not.

and if you're on desktop, grayjay. apparently it's based on pipepipe, saw some file or folder names when doing a timeshift restore