Out of those I mentioned, Newpipe was actually my favourite (LibreTube felt too beta, only used it for a week at most) and I’ve used it for years. Vanced was great too. But there’s always something, like what happened to Vanced for example. I don’t know, I felt like I was spending way too much time installing third party apps, trying to get them to work properly after Google’s endless shenanigans. Paying them is more convenient / less time consuming.
As a former Kagi user (quit all my US company subscriptions recently in order to support EU) I’ve now used Startpage for a month and it has been great so far.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Startpage.com