It’s been a while since I’ve logged into YouTube but my impression is that the experience including recommendations is worse if you are logged in.

That was my experience years ago when I last did so. Logging in offered no visible upsides and multiple downs.

I learned not to log in and use search wherever possible.

Now I use Invidious (with JS disabled and/or uMatrix blocking YouTube functionality in the browser as an additional nudge), or youtube-dl / ytdl / mpv to play video directly. Usually audio-only for talkpieces.

I'll also disable recommendations and comments portions of the website, for additional bonus (via Stylus).

I've been using a cron job to watch/download my watch later playlist so I can view the videos on plex at a later time: https://github.com/nburns/utilities/blob/master/youtube.fish...

Theres another script that deletes watched videos from the specific youtube plex library every night.

It works great as long as you remember to remove the videos from your watched later playlist before watching them on plex. (Have yet to find out a simple way to automate playlist removal)

<https://github.com/mps-youtube/mps-youtube>

It was (well, still is) a terminal-based YouTube client which provided search, locally-managed playlists, choice of playback mode (video or audio-only), downloads, and a number of other features. YouTube quashed it with an API-key limitations such that it is now effectively unusable.

But for a brief moment, YouTube content was accessible from a terminal window or console, without all the godawful dark patterns of the site itself. That was tremendously useful.

These days I'll snag videos by URL via youtube-dl/ytdl, and/or mpv (which invokes those transparently). Not quite as magickal, but still pretty good.

Hrm... Apparently there's a successor project, yewtube:

<https://github.com/mps-youtube/mps-youtube/issues/1191>

<https://iamtalhaasghar.github.io/yewtube/#installation>

I'm going to have to check that out...