Desktop users: Regular reminder that you can use mpv in combination with yt-dlp to just, open youtube videos in a local player instead of on the webbed site. Setup varies from platform to platform but the end result is not actually watching them on youtube at all, which is generally more energy and data efficient (depending on which streams you grab), coincidentally bypasses all of youtube's ads, and in my case makes it easier to skip burned in ads too.
You can also use RSS feeds to get new video notifications for channels, so you can just remove all cookie access from youtube and never have to worry again about One Weird Click ruining The Algo for the next week or whatever.
There's also alternate youtube frontends at this point but I've been content using the above personally.
If you're on a phone, good luck.