If your willing to deal with self hosting, immich is a great alternative. Its facial recognition and search is practically on par with google photos.
The only downside is it doesnt’ have photo editing, and its under active developmeant (it gets weekly updates and you occasionally need to modify docker config though they do give a warning in ui).
I have a fire tv cube just direct launch into apps to avoid this. For example instead of powering on the fire tv with power button I tell Alexa to open the app I need.
Down side is this doesn’t really work with sieloaded apps like smart tube
Only time I every encountered the popup was when I used orion with its built in adblocker. And even then I gat one warning (no metion of 3 strike policy). Only change now is the added a 3 second timer to the dismiss button.
Only gripe is your stuck to the web version of youtube (especially on ios).
If you want sponsorblock in the native youtube app you have to side load a mod which means either dealing with apple’s 7 day limit refresh or paying for a apple dev acount/ signing service subscription.
Android there is revanced (no sideloading subscriptions needed).
On a final note I am considering trying grayjay.app
It bundles odessy, nebula, youtube and a few other platforms in one app (it also includes sponsorblock and return dislikes for youtube).
I know this isn’t YouTube’s fault but one thing that bugs me about yet premium is when creators dump baked in ads.
As a user you have 3 options:
Deal with it and manual skip (in a way this feels like skipping commercials on cable tv Dvr)
Get ready to buy a ton of patreon subscriptions (kills the point of getting yt premium).
Get a modded client/ use browser extensions and use sponsorblock
Now the one exception to this is nebula where like YouTube you pay an all access fee but no baked in ads (I pay for this currently).
I do wonder if creators had the option to make videos available via YouTube premium only (say early access and no baked in ads). Would more people pay and would creators use this system? (They wouldn’t have to worry about demonetization).