I feel like most have misunderstood the point of the question, they offer to use newpipe, yt-dlp and the like, but those aren't private, they just allow you to watch without signing in, just as you could through the official website with maybe uBlock origin, you're still exposing your IP.
The only fitting suggestion I saw is that of downloading from invidious through yt-dlp, which sounds pretty neat, I had no idea you could when the web frontend is apparently not working

yt-dlp

Downside is that you'll have to regularly delete all the videos you've downloaded.

Hell, I'm having issues using the plain old YouTube website. It tries to make me sign in.

I pay a subscription to nebula and most of the creators i want are on there.

Grayjay

Tubular on on mobile and trying to find a Non Electron app for pc

Freetube and newpipe for me. However I will say they just don't work sometimes. So then I just am left with my browser.

On mobile, Firefox plus ublock works well. There are a few issues like losing your position if the page reloads, but it works pretty consistently otherwise.

I also use NewPipe, but Google breaks it fairly regularly.

Searching Videos on FreeTube but watching these in the SMplayer, because FreeTube lists theVideos, but often don't play it. SMplayer works almost always, Also possible open the Video copying the URL in it. Another possibility is searching the Video with Andisearch and watch it there in the search results sandboxed and anonym with the random proxies which use Andisearch.

I discovered that I watch enough YouTube to warrant paying for a premium subscription. I've turned off viewing history (after one video, so the homepage renders).

This isn't a solution for everyone, but it works for me.

I found that switching my VPN server allowed FreeTube to work for me. I'm on Mullvad's South African servers atm, which are quite slow. If anyone knows of any unblocked Mullvad servers that are faster, lmk, but those were the first ones I found that you can use FreeTube with.

Downie.app (MacOS) and yt-dlp (multiplatform).

I am not watching YouTube content while these are blocked. I will not watch stupid ads. I will not submit to shitty platforms that suck. Until these work again, there is no YouTube.

I'm finding other ways to fill my free time during the holiday break. I'll have a bevy of new content to watch when they're updated.

YTDLnis

You can watch, download video, download only audio.

Newpipe still up as of this morning. Hope it stays that way.

Vpn

I use a bot on mastodon named birba@rss-parrot.net . It sends me a link of new videos from creators I follow.I directly open the link with Tubular (newpipe fork) or freetube and download it to watch later.

I personally use libretube (with piped proxy disabled in settings) with proton vpn. If it shows the "sign in to confrim your not a bot" mesaage I just swap vpn servers.