What if I considered it a moral imperative to financially damage FAANG companies in any way I can? What if I was fine paying money each month as long as it went towards harming Youtube?

How do you think that’s relevant to the question of data mining?

Or use it in a way that doesn't give up your data quite so easily. I recommend Minitube for Linux desktop and NewPipe for android.

It’s wishful thinking to hope that they can’t mine that. If you connect to a Google server, they’re analyzing your activity. Not running their JavaScript disrupts ads but they still get information about what type of videos you like, when and where you watch them, and what kind of devices you use.

True enough. I've thought before it'd be good to cache and mirror YouTube videos as they're watched, and then provide them through IPFS with an index that's shipped around so people can pre-filter their searches and page hits against that index first. Lots of work, obviously. More than I have time for, alas. But I'm confident that'll happen eventually.

IPFS seems like a poor choice for that: wouldn’t it be giving the copyright enforcers an API to query to look for potential people to sue?

True enough. Things like Tribler would be good, if they did intra-tribler connections.