I finally broke down and paid for YouTube Premium. There is literally no other option to watch YouTube on a TV nowadays. It is absolutely mindblowing the level of nonstop ads they shove down your throat in-between (and during) every single video now. Completely unwatchable otherwise. And it's impossible to buy a dumb TV in 2022, so you're stuck with the official Android/Roku YouTube apps that have no ad-blocking capability. Even pihole doesn't work anymore; they've obviously figured out how to get around the DNS issue. It just seems like every day things are getting worse.

I use https://github.com/yuliskov/SmartTubeNext Smart Tube Next on a Firestick. I side loaded both the beta and release versions with adb. I have not seen a commercial since. If Release doesn't work, try Beta. One of them always seems to work.

>> And it's impossible to buy a dumb TV in 2022

Next best thing: I bought a Samsung TV last year and never accepted the Terms and Conditions. No ads.

Edit: fixed link syntax