These days I use Btrfs snapshots to do incremental backups to an external drive each week, it’s manual but it takes less than 5 minutes a week, the most I risk losing is a week of data and I trust it a lot more than relying on some external service that might go down at any time or randomly decide to delete my account. For most people just worried about photos I would assume that’s enough, I feel like anything else is just over-engineered.
I strongly believe nuisance advertising should be fought separately from privacy concerns. Both are valid concerns but need a different approach. Advertising based on website visits that collect user data is privacy intrusive, but an ad baked into a YouTube video is probably not (regardless of whether it’s annoying or not).
It’s an unnecessary layer of abstraction that solves a problem that never existed. If you have a lot of podcasts it’s nice to be able to organise them in a directory structure that makes sense to you, not necessarily what the app wants. Also podcast file names aren’t always easily sortable or even human-readable so you’ll want to rename them as you save them.
If you don’t really care about the podcast then that’s OK, but if I like a podcast I want a permanent offline copy to relisten to if the podcast goes offline. I guess I’m a bit of a data-hoarder and that’s niche, but simply being able to save a file you download to where you want I think should be a standard feature, there’s no need for an extra layer of abstraction.
If it’s just the fallback that’s failing for the occasional video, under settings > general settings > Fallback to Non-Preferred Backend on Failure: - Check that the invidious instance there actually works.
If it’s happening regularly I would say there’s something else because that’s not normal, it used to be less reliable than it is now but it’s been very good for the last year or so. Only very occasionally I have to fall back to using yt-dlp these days (unless of course I’m keeping the video).
Nobody sane wants to “use” it, but sometimes someone will inconsiderately link something on there.