I’ve had some success using piped kavin rocks as a private front end. But I admit I still fall back to YouTube using an Adblock and sponsor block a lot of the time.

Weren’t they brought by an ad company?

That’s fair, it took me a while to get away from Google as well. Everyone’s journey is different and can take a while to completely move away from them. The only difficulty I had was replacing YouTube.

I’m surprised anyone on privacy guides would still be using Google. That notification alone would make me want to switch

Same here. I installed signal but only managed to convince 2 people to use it so far. Everyone else is on WhatsApp