Customize YouTube to work exactly the way you want it to.
I'm using this all the time myself. There is no login to YouTube required and it supports adding subscriptions and doing everything important you can do on YouTube.
Am I the only one that hates third-party clients for Desktop? They all have terrible UI and UX. Firefox + UBlock + Youtube is the way to go. For the phone it's NewPipe or Grayjay.
Personally I still use the Firefox + uBlock + SponsorBlock + YouTube combo on my phone too. Maybe if I watched more YouTube on my phone it'd be worth figuring out an app with a better mobile UI, but I like that it's a consistent experience anywhere I watch from.
I used to think it is redundant too, but now see it as a quality-of-life difference. Because I can track my subscriptions and watch history, as well as have playlists. That is a massive improvement over folders of bookmarks.
Let's be real, no matter how you're watching YouTube, if you're accessing the video directly and not cached through a third party server, Google is still tracking you.
Not because if taste, but because it is the YouTube UI that then allows you to add and remove stuff from the UI, getting away from all the user-hostile stuff. If you want to.
If you use ublock origin and watch a lot, they'll eventually put your ip address on a list where you have to log in to watch anything. Newpipe seems to be able to circumvent this but yt-dlp can't. I haven't tried freetube but maybe freetube can circumvent that.