Use Invidious, Piped or any other frontend that doesn't track and manipulate you.

Adding https://youtube-lite.js.org/#/ to the list.

What do you mean by "browsing" Youtube? Clicking new links for the purpose of entertainment?

My post was only about playing videos.

Well, how do you get to the videos? How do you discover their links to pipe to mpv/yt-dl?

One option is RSS (YouTube still supports it) subscribing to channels. Do you know of others?

I don't, i use Youtube for listening to music or livestreams that i already know the title of.

In addition to Piped, and Invidious, mentioned by sibling comments, which allow you to subscribe, search, and provide recommendations, you can use a complete CLI workflow with something like ytfzf[0], or, you can use the search commands on yt-dlp[1], which are also accessibly through mpv using the ytdl:// prefix.

Getting familiar with such tools not only replaces the terrible UXes you have to be subjected to, but also gives you the power and freedom to be creative with how you use Youtube and other online streaming sites.

I wrote various tiny scripts to replace all my needs for Youtube search, using any highlighted text, with a shortcut, Youtube Music, with a synced plain text file of song titles and a shuffle-on-read script, and more curiously, a script to help me slowly go through all thousands of my partner's favorite songs, and then, using shortcuts, add them to my own favorites, decide on them later, add them to the "what the heck do you listen to" friendly banter list, or the "my ears bleeding" list, etc. Much better UX then anything the slow web UIs can offer, and with minimum hacking.

[0]: https://ytfzf.github.io/

[1]: https://github.com/yt-dlp/yt-dlp