Last two weeks every time I use Piped I am getting error “Sign in to confirm you are not a bot”. It happens on every instance and videos work very rarely. It seems like Google enforces you to log in if you try watch lot of videos from one IP. I hope this will not be end of Piped and there will be solution for this problem.
Upd. I got similar problem on Invidious recently
If you’re looking for an ad-free client that still works right now; In the 6 years I’ve been using YouTube (re)vanced on android, I’ve only had it fail to play videos for 1 single day around 6 months ago. That was fixed within 24hrs.
Not quite the same as a full custom instance/frontend like piped; but it’ll do the job while you wait for updates.