For everyone on Android, you can just patch the youtube app using ReVanced, which will remove ads, add sponsorblock, allow you to hide shorts and the "People also watched" sections. It can be pretty tricky to patch if you don't know what you're doing so feel free to tell me if you run into any issues.
If you don't care about the algorithm and your feed, you can get the third-party client NewPipe, it's FOSS but sometimes crashes while reading some videos It does not seem to crash anymore, so good thing!
Strange, I've had a video that crashed newpipe every time but now it seems to play fine. Maybe because it was a "Coming soon" video?
Anyways it seems like it works fine now, I also had a bug where leaving the app would crash the app instead of doing background play but I also can't get it to occur again. I'll edit my original comment.