When I watch YouTube videos on my Android phone, I almost always use the NewPipe app. It offers a privacy-friendly experience, protects me from ads, and offers a few more options that you would only get with YouTube Premium (downloading video or audio, for example).

On the PC, I still mostly use the YouTube site itself. It’s ok with uBlock Origin, but I’d still prefer a private alternative.

A few times I tried the project Invidious, but my experience was rather not so good. The videos took a very long time to load.

A new alternative could be Piped. It also uses the NewPipe extractor in the background, connected to a Java backend and a Go proxy. First short tests showed me that at least the official instance has no speed problems. To increase speed a CDN is also used to cache videos.

How legal the whole thing is is of course another question…