lol that sounds like an existing old-YouTube bug that ReVanced also suffered of a while ago.
You’d wanna use an up-to-date version, but that’s hard on such an old android version
I’d suggest - even tho it isn’t 1:1 the same - that you export your subscriptions from Google and import them either into LibreTube (closer to the official YT app) or NewPipe.
Because LibreTube uses the (awesome) Piped Project to load videos and info, you can also sync data using it and your favourite piped instance. (piped.video, piped.smnz.de, piped.adminforge.de are personal recommendations)
I would wager a guess and say that many joined long before they got this bad, probably because back then their visions and values were a lot more aligned
Nowadays I rarely see more than hectic startups and Big Tech, both of which have massive downsides which affect people outside of their field too.
Additionally, especially at the HQs of Google and others, many SWEs live in vans on the street because rent is too high, they cannot just work somewhere else as that won’t actually change the situation
Judging from how many SWEs are in the US, its basically this or loose your job. And that’d be a bit bad because of how many different pricing crisis there are at the moment.
For the web, there is Piped (github.com/teampiped/piped) and Invidious (invidious.io)
NOTE: Only Piped proxies your videos, which means invidious allows connections directly to Google to load the video.
Android
On Android, there’s NewPipe and LibreTube which are well known by now.
NOTE: LibreTube uses Piped to preserve privacy and (somewhat) anonymity when watching, thus you’ll need to select some piped instance with it.
iOS
On iOS, there’s the web frontends and Yattee (github.com/yattee/yattee).
NOTE: Yattee is on the AppStore, but without any sources/instances by default. Look for “instances” in the settings and add a Piped API URL, like https://pipedapi.kavin.rocks to watch videos from YouTube with Piped+Yattee.
Desktop
On Desktop, there is all the web clients as well as FreeTube (freetubeapp.io).
NOTE: FreeTube has an option to proxy everything or just the videos through Invidious to preserve privacy. It is recommended to enable this.
What I like to do is export my subscriptions using Google’s data export page, and then import it into a Piped instance, in my case piped.adminforge.de or piped.smnz.de
They will actually, as they’re looking for specific things to be blocked/altered using JavaScript that is easily affected by enabling certain custom lists. In case you don’t believe me, you can look on uBO’s official statement regarding this.