It's not just cost and ads. It's having the possibility to reduce attempts to manipulate my inner reptile brain. With various clients, you can disable shorts, recommended, you have sponsorblock, you can replace youtube-face-thumbs with actual thumbs and get crowd-sourced titles that better reflect the contents.

I also don't need to manually go set speed to 1.75x and enable subs in english, it's a one-time setting. _Further_ I can download a video locally, for whatever reason (later viewing, bw throttling, risk of deletion, etc).

As if that weren't enough, I don't have to watch videos logged in, my client is just set up to download my select channels.

I now see zero use of a youtube account.

The cost of being brainwashed by ads and sponsor slots is also high.

Even with YouTube Premium you don’t get the feature set you get with SmartTube. The sponsor block integration on my TV is brilliant.

I think it's more shocking to people how much YouTube Premium costs.

Sometimes people download it because there's no alternative. E.g. the YT app is not available in the play store in their country on that specific hardware, so the only way to be able to view YT is to use an alternative app like this one.

Google Account.

Not Youtube account.

I really couldn't care less about me youtube account