If you're on mobile there's alternative ways of watching Youtube videos, at least if you're on Android:

https://github.com/TeamNewPipe/NewPipe

No ads, no direct tracking [1], just videos.

[1] Google can still watch your device downloading videos of course...

NewPipe is great. I'm honestly kind of surprised that it's allowed on the play store.

One of the first things mentioned on that Github page is the following warning:

WARNING: PUTTING NEWPIPE OR ANY FORK OF IT INTO GOOGLE PLAYSTORE VIOLATES THEIR TERMS OF CONDITIONS.

Newpipe is available on F-Droid but that version is sometimes a bit old. The project maintainers suggest the following order of preference for getting access to the latest version:

In order to get this new version, you can:

- Build a debug APK yourself. This is the fastest way to get new features on your device, but is much more complicated, so we recommend using one of the other methods.

- Download the APK from releases and install it.

- Update via F-droid. This is the slowest method of getting updates, as F-Droid must recognize changes, build the APK itself, sign it, then push the update to users.

It's not afaics. It's on f-droid though.

Tried it, annoying because it forgets I have YouTube Premium and starts showing me ads. Now I just turn history off forever.