All of this led to me ditching all of those (except YouTube, this is without a real alternative due to the content exclusively hosted there) and starting to self-host my stuff and joining the Fediverse.
you can use invidious or piped on PC and newpipe on a phone. just be careful cause i heard google removed newpipe from the playstore and someone put something malicious with the same name, but im not sure how that situation is going
I use the NewPipe fork with Sponsorblock as an optional feature.
You can get NewPipe on F-Droid here and the fork with Sponsorblock here.
As a rule of thumb, I always check their respective GitHub pages for links, I don't really trust the Google Store. There are too many spam duplicates of various apps, especially FOSS ones.
To have some sort of viable fediverse alternative to YouTube, the developers of it would have to abandon some of the free software principles that current fediverse platforms uphold. There needs to be a way to monetize to attract creators and get people to host the servers
The closest anyone's come to a mechanism that would allow efficient financing of public goods like free software is quadratic funding. Unfortunately, there are unsolved issues with collusion and identity verification
If it were possible, I'd like to continually donate a given sum of money to an account that split the proceeds between the content creators and the people hosting. Granted, while I'm unemployed, the best I can do currently would be to donate hosting directly