The YouTube adblocker battle is going to be a constantly moving target, so take this with a grain of salt as who knows when it’ll break.
I use Firefox with ublock origin and watch directly on YouTube. I don’t sign in, and I track the content I follow via rss. No ads, no nags, no issues.
Piped and similar as well as yt-dlp are also great and are better options for giving YouTube the middle finger, which I fully endorse. Just giving another option.