My main method for watching youtube has been through invidious in the browser, both on mobile and desktop, using a public instance that allows proxying videos.
Using invidious as the proxy means my own machine will not connect directly to google's servers, I can even block google/youtube outright and invidious will still fetch the video. Using a public instance means my traffic will blend in with that of other people using the same instance, theoretically making it harder to profile me specifically using only the videos I watched.
That said, Invidious was having some issues recently because of Google blocking them and/or pushing changes to YouTube that affected Invidious, videos would sometimes not load, and the number of working instances has declined unfortunately.