Do they not actually want people to use the service? You find a channel you really like, then you watch their content from first to last. What kind of lunatic watches someone's uploads out of chronological order? How can you keep track of what you have and haven't seen if you do that? Youtube may as well remove subscriptions and replace the home page with a big-ass "Random" button.

You know what makes more database queries than sorting by date? Making me manually scroll through thousands of videos to the bottom and loading thumbnails for all of them. I don't care how restrictive they make the API, they can't stop me from writing a "start from oldest" extension that gives you a button to just automatically scroll to the bottom.

What kind of goddamn sociopath OK's a change like this?

Please start an open source project for such an extension and count me in.

I'm so aggravated by YT's idiotic decision because I agree 100% with the usage pattern you describe. Over the years, that is exactly what I've done many, many times.

Sure, I also watch random videos here and there from channels I never ever come back to. But if I ever want to look at the entirety of someone's uploaded videos and sort them by anything at all, it's always by "oldest first". The remaining two options are useful, too, for sure. But I've never actively sorted anything by popularity manually. Always "oldest first".

https://github.com/TeamNewPipe/NewPipe

https://github.com/libredirect/libredirect

Sounds like the changes you want should be possible to add to NewPipe.