I remember Hooktube. That was when front ends were still trying to play nice by accessing youtube the “right way”.

They killed that one off pretty hastily.

Invidious was the hero successor, but I think we all knew that it would eventually come to this. Invidious’ most recent fixes for blocking involve passing identity tokens, making a concession that Google is then better able to track users behind Invidious.

I’m not sure how much farther there is left to go on the technical angle of this fight.