Quick shout-out to Grayjay: An app to watch videos on any platform - reducing the power of individual services. The Software is open-source and can be found here: https://gitlab.futo.org/videostreaming/grayjay
I will test this out for myself and hope someone here finds this useful.
Not sure what part of a free YT+ frontend that doesn't require permissions or an account you don't trust, but the reason is they don't want people to fork it freely and spread a version with malware, like happened to NewPipe.
I understand the reasoning, but I disagree that it's an effective solution, or if it was, that it'd be worth what you're giving up.