I am transferring all of my email address; a few years back it took me months to figure out what was all going to my gmail account that was used signing up for stuff even though there was some web app I used, I was going to move away from the Google as much as possible, minus search and YouTube. Several months ago I moved away from Google search, and was stuck with YouTube as there is no real competition to it, that my favourite channels use, so I am stuck with it.
So iCloud’s hide my email was the replacement for Gmail, it was a lot easier to cancel junk mail by being able to just turn off email addresses that started spamming me. Come now to the buy Canadian stuff I am turning off all my hide my email addresses and moving some to proton pass, most of the emails so far I can just delete but many I have to go to the webpage and change the address. It is hard work and I have given myself a deadline of the end of the month when my iCloud subscription is done and dusted. Only 152 email addresses left!
Check out freetubeapp.io on desktop and newpipe on Android for YouTube. You are right that there is no competitors, but at least this way they don't get any ad revenue from you.
I have a pihole with some youtube ad blocking techniques added to it. I have a premium account that is good until November or something like that, but when I sign out of my youtube account and watch YouTube that way it does a good job blocking ads.
The Google is an advertisement company, my pihole blocks all the ads everywhere.
Can you please share your YouTube blocking techniques for pihole. In my experience YouTube injects their ads as part of the stream, which I haven't had luck blocking with DNS ad blocking
https://github.com/topics/pihole-youtube-ads
I second that
https://github.com/topics/pihole-youtube-ads