You're on Android use NewPipe and it's forks, personally I prefer Tubular and PipePipe.

Periodically YouTube will break, but both of those forks, as well as new pipe prime, update fairly quickly.

GrayJay is interesting... It has different feel and feature set than newpipe, but it's worth using. I will say I get more login errors with GrayJay, but closing the app and reopening it resolves them immediately.

All the piped apps will be in f-droid/droidify, you can download GrayJay directly, or just scan the QR to add the repo to a FOSS repo manager.

YouTube doesn't like VPNs. Harder to track you (and sell/monetize your data) if they can't tell who you are.

This helps protect our ~~community~~ revenue.

Try Freetube, it still works well, even with videos that are age limited.

Yea, been having this BIGTIME. Even occurs on grayjay, and pipe apps (newpipe, etc.) Its aggravating. Can't even download vids either, and the ones u have downloaded are held ransom until u turn it off too 😂 at least in my case. Fuck google.

This is the result of them blocking invidious. They targeted large Datacenter nodes and check for the number of requests from those datacenters that aren't logged in, and block them until that number meets a certain threshold. This also causes people with VPNs to get this message. The solution is to connect to smaller self-hosted invidious instances or using proxies hosted on normal residential ips.

Have you considered trying out NewPipe or its fork Tubular (with SponsorBlocck built in)?

the stupidest thing about this is that I literally am signed into youtube (yeah yeah, I know), and I still get this shit!

Yeah. Our work endpoint is in AWS. YouTube hates that. So does reddit.

As much as it isn't preferred, I can usually bypass the sign in shenanigans by going directly to the website to watch something without signing in. I usually only get the login prompt when going through my browser or a search engine.