I follow several youtube channels, but recently I've been more and more tempted to jump ship, subscribe to Nebula and forget about youtube completely. It's not just that advertising has become more and more invasive, with longer, non-skippable, breaks, but also that the current approach favors clickbaity titles way too much. As a result, even informative channels have resorted to sensational titles which are completely misleading or downright false just to try to get higher in the recommendation list.
Even worse is the title/thumbnail optmization done by some channels who keep changing it to try and get more views. For channels which I routinely follow it's easy to spot, but for the ones which I check weekly (or less) I have trouble guessing if I've already watched the video or not, forcing me to try and see the initial ad AGAIN.
In any case the current economic situation is messing things up for social networks: facebook threatened me to switch on ads or pay a subscription, no "third option". I only use it for messenger, so I don't really care, but of course after the message I opened my home just to see what's going on..... half of the posts are "sponsored".....
 

One of the reasons I use android is the freedom to sideload apps. There are two YouTube solutions I know about, YouTube Revanced and GrayJay which both block ads. Grayjay. Maybe pick up a cheap android tablet just for YouTube?
 

There are partial solutions to youtube problems, but gotta say I would prefer youtube to sort its own issues, rather than me puzzling over how to make it at least somewhat useable.

> I have trouble guessing if I've already watched the video or not
For that, I'm using RSS feeds for channels/playlists I follow, and never visit youtube to check the updates. RSS readers usually mark viewed/new in a clear way.

As for clickbaity titles, there's no way to change them (yet, I'm pretty sure this will be doable with AI soon), but installing an extension that changes all caps to lowercase already was a huge relief.
 

I have a work around that works for the moment but I suspect it won't last. I use the Brave browser that has a built in ad blocker and the same browser allows me to save a shortcut to the youtube web page to my home screen that looks and acts like an app button. I just use that button instead of the Youtube app. I have an Android phone though so I am not sure if IOS allows similar functionality.
 

Just don't forget to have the device online 3-4 days before you want to watch a downloaded video.
In the airplane it is too late to do that.
(found out the hard way that 'offline' does NOT really mean 'offline')