I only still use YouTube (most video sites, really) because of yt-dlp and uBlock Origin and similar, although I will say that video discoverability has gone straight to hell in the past 5 years.
Being able to build a big media library of shit I actually want to watch and listen to has been great, and I probably wouldn't have bothered if YouTube hadn't shit the bed so hard.

libretube is kinda useful as a frontend if you're on mobile, and supports downloads
annoyingly, it won't mux all the pieces into one file, I'll need to go do some ffmpeg magic if I want to export the files I downloaded off of the phone
it has a lot of problems, but it's infinitely better versus using YouTube directly while on the go