For some time I've been tinkering with a script which manages my own fine-grained youtube subscription preferences, periodically scrapes various pages for metadata, and then as necessary extracts videos by using the youtube-dl utility. The end result is a directory on my machine which always has a few interesting videos to watch, ad-free, tracking-free, network connection free, using my favorite full-featured video playback tools.
I think others seeking a minimalist youtube experience might enjoy youtube-dl: https://rg3.github.io/youtube-dl/
If you like youtube-dl you should check out mps-youtube (https://github.com/mps-youtube/mps-youtube) which has the ability to use youtuble-dl as the backend I'm pretty sure (i prefer to use the native one personally)
It's also gpl vs youtube-dl's public domain.
I'm sure eventually I'll figure out a way to just do it in emacs. (I'm mostly joking... kinda... maybe.)