Shameless self-promotion: https://github.com/andunieee/cathode (gtk4 desktop app) can give you a non-bait interface to YouTube that works.

Now this project gives me some ideas of things to implement:

- pick the thumbnail from the middle of the video

- allow curated subscriptions, i.e. I subscribe to some curated list made by someone (in this case it could be the database of videos Karpathy has gathered from HN, but there could be others)

At some point I was almost implementing DeArrow support, but using it for a while I don't think it is too great, often the alternative titles people give are unreliable, and honestly I don't know how they exist without being spammed or trolled to death. I do have SponsorBlock support though (I feel like SponsorBlock would work better if it allowed high-quality AI bots to submit blocks though).