Since people talk a lot about Invidious lately, I would like to share this great desktop app for those who don’t know it yet. It uses Invidious and lets you watch YouTube without ads. It even has SponsorBlock (you might need to enable it in settings though). You can add videos to favourites and see the history - all stored locally. It’s Free Software.
It is worth noting it uses the invidious API however it does default to a local API, this can be changed in settings or it will fall back to invidious whenever the local API fails. I have had a great experience using this app for the last few weeks would thouroughly agree with your reccomendation of it.
Good point, I wasn’t sure what the default settings was. When you choose Invidious, it will select a random instance on each launch.