FreeTube supports external players, if you use it as a tool to find videos instead of watching them, it works fairly reliably, such breakage of feed grabbing hasn't happened in years. Then you just grab the videos with MPV via yt-dlp, not only MPV is a much better player than practically anything else, but yt-dlp contributors are much faster at figuring out problems and implementing fixes.

It's better to silo things that require you to install an extension on browsers into a different app. Extensions alter browser fingerprints. So this let's you sponsorblock and AdBlock YouTube without worrying about fingerprints on all other sites

Also has a nice way to handle subscriptions without login

Adding to this, I want to follow channels and subscribe to creators, without making an account registered on youtube. I already have sponsor block and you block and a bunch of other enhancements for youtube, but it's hard for me to curate the content that comes my way without having an account signed in.

So I just renamed FreeTube app to YouTube on my desktop machines, and slap the YouTube logo on it, and now it's logically partitioned from everything else.

I actually do the same thing with a handful of other sites that I traffic frequently, instead of just making a profile for them or a sandboxed container for them. Facebook and Reddit both get summoned either from the start menu or from Mac OS spotlight and at least in theory those browsers that have been renamed and re-icon'd won't be able to interact with any of my other browsers in any way.

Next step is to learn how to block those domains from my other browsers, and the block all of the domains from those specific rebadged browsers.

But for now, FreeTube is hands down the best game in town if I want to watch, say, the five most recent episodes from Hank Green or Level1 Techs, in a row.