To be fair, I do pay for subscriptions for a few YouTubers. Wintergatan in particular is excellent. Of course, many creatives are using Patreon and other external revenue sources and frankly that's wise, given YouTube's track record with unusual copyright strikes and other platform nonsense.

Even if I were to pay for Youtube Red, this application has a feature that I cannot get with the official app: a lack of dependence on the Google Play store and services. Since I run a build of Android that does not include those services, this app is wonderful to bridge the gap, as it performs much better than playing the videos directly in Firefox. That it happens to include a bunch of extra features the official app does not is just a bonus really.