YouTube doesn’t actually throttle the video stream on the server, they just use some JavaScript on their official website that adds delay to the playback when Firefox is detected. The Invidious client directly connects to Google servers for video streaming, but it just displays the raw video stream without any ads, artificial delay or any crap like that.
By default, when using Invidious, your browser loads the video right from Google, you can proxy videos through the Invidious instance but it’s disabled by default. Only Piped always proxies videos through the Piped server.
Pi-Hole can’t block YouTube ads. Use LibreWolf with uBlock Origin, it works like a dream. Or try alternative frontends for YouTube like Invidious or Piped. These are even better when combined with LibRedirect, it automatically redirects all YouTube links to your preferred alternative frontend.
Invidious and Piped work in the browser, you can combine them with LibRedirect to automatically redirect all YouTube links. LibRedirect is great, you can also use it to redirect other websites, e.g. Twitter -> Nitter, Reddit -> Teddit, etc.
First thing that comes to mind is user agent spoofer.
If we all go ahead and spoof our user agents to Chrome, Google will say ‘No one uses Firefox’. Use better solutions like Invidious and Piped in combination wit LibRedirect instead.
You can exclude youtube.com in the LibRedirect settings. For some reason that doesn’t seem to work though, but you can always click on the LibRedirect icon in the extension toolbar and hit ‘Redirect to Original’. You can also set up a keybinding for that.
Use Piped or Invidious, it also bypasses ads and tracking. It works best in combination with LibRedirect, which you can configure to automatically redirect all YouTube links to Piped or Invidious.
GrapheneOS is built to work with a locked bootloader, in fact, relocking the bootloader is a step in the installation guide. It’s not rooted by default and the GOS team highly recommends against rooting, all apps should work as long as they only require SafetyNet basic integrity. If they require full integrity, they won’t work on GrapheneOS because the OS has to be manually whitelisted by Google in order to pass the full integrity check. Most apps (including banking or government apps) only mandate basic integrity though, full integrity is rarely required. It should definitely work better than LineageOS.
Don’t even get me started on the flaws with Apple, their walled garden and the App Store
It’s the reason I left the Apple ecosystem and switched to a far superior operating system that actually respects the user and gives them freedom over their devices. GrapheneOS is awesome!