Seems like Piped and Invidious are both on their last legs. Public instances on both services are pretty iffy, they go down fairly often now. Freetube works well on desktop but no real way to sync subscriptions and watch history to a phone. Self-hosting Piped/Invidious might be the solution but I don’t know if it’s worth the upkeep when YouTube is actively fighting against it.
Self-host. Nothing they can do about that
They can block or throttle clients that don’t look like what they want. And often do.
They could also start requiring some click path or captcha etc that is hard to script. Or even login (registration is free!). And “DRM”.
Oh, they want a specific cookie/user-agent? We’ll get around that.
Let piped show the captcha to us, no problem.
Dynamic click paths are something I have no idea about, I’m no front-end developer haha.
I’ll either get off YT when they require logins, or I hope piped comes up with something that Vanced used to do.
I already have DRM seitched off in my browser (librewolf), hasn’t posed a problem yet. We’ll see.